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Literary Leaders of 
Modern England 

BY 

W. J. DAWSON 



SELECTED CHAPTERS FROM "THE MAKERS OF MODERN 

POETRY," AND "THE MAKERS OF MODERN PROSE," 

BY PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER, 

THOS. WHITTAKER, NEW YORK 



/ 










NEW YORK CHAUTAUQUA SPRINGFIELD CHICAGO 

^i)e (!ri)autau(iua ^rc00 

MCMII 






THm.lBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

AUG. f 1902 

CnPVRIQHT ENT9V 

CLASS <^XXc..N0. 
COPY 8. 



The Lakeside Press, Chicago. III., U. S. A. 
R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

^ I. William Wordsworth - . - i 

; II. The Connection between Wordsworth's 

^^ . Life and His Poetry - - - lo 

III. Wordsworth's View of Nature and Man 19 

IV. Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political 

Poems ------ 30 

V. Wordsworth's Personal Characteristics 42 
VI. William Wordsworth — Concluding Sur- 
vey ----.. 51 

VII. Lord Tennyson — General Characteris- 
tics ------ 61 

VIII. Tennyson's Treatment of Nature - 70 

IX. Tennyson — Love and Woman - - 82 

X. Tennyson's View of Life and Society - 96 

XI. Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 108 

XII. Tennyson's "In Memoriam " - - iig 

XIII. Robert Browning - - - - 143 

XIV. Browning's Philosophy of Life - 153 
XV. The Spirit of Browning's Religion - 163 

XVI. Browning's Attitude to Christianity — 

Concluding Survey - - - 173 

XVII. Thomas Carlyle . . - . 189 

XVIII. Carlyle's Teaching - - - 207 

XIX. John Ruskin ..... 218 

XX. The Teaching of Ruskin - - 228 

XXI. Ruskin's Ideal of Women - - - 240 



Selections from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Carlyle, and Ruskin - - 251-274 



PREFACE 

The following essays, dealing with five great liter- 
ary leaders of modern England, are taken from the 
two volumes by Dr. William J. Dawson, entitled, 
"The Makers of Modern Poetry" and "The Makers 
of Modern Prose." A few typical selections from 
each writer are added. These are intended to sup- 
plement the quotations in the text, and it is hoped 
that they will lead the reader to extend still further 
his acquaintance with the works of the authors. 



LITERARY LEADERS OF 
MODERN ENGLAND 



CHAPTER I 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

Born at Cockermouth, April 7, 1770. Poems first published 
1798. Became Poet Laureate 1843. Died at Rydal Mount, 
April 23, 1850. 

In many respects, and those the most essential, the 
influence of William Wordsworth is the most powerful 
and abiding poetic influence of the Victorian period. 
During his lifetime his fame was comparatively restricted, 
and during the greater part of his career his very claim to 
be a poet was eagerly disputed, and widely and vehemently 
denied. Lord Jeffrey's verdict that he was a drivelmg 
idiot, and wouldn't do, has become historical, and is a 
memorable example of the ineptitude and virulence of that 
criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the Edin- 
burgh Review. By a curious chastisement of fate, the 
ancient criticism is chiefly remembered to-day by its con- 
temptuous hostility to Byron, its brutal attack on Keats, 
and its undiscerning violence of hatred for Wordsworth. 
Sydney Smith said he wou'd be glad to be as sure of any- 
thing as Macaulay was of everything, and the dogmatical 
criticism of Macaulay was typical of the criticism of the 
time. It possessed neither justice nor urbanity; its weap- 



2 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

ons were the bludgeon and the tomahawk; and it knew no 
mean between extravagant laudation and merciless abuse. 
Some one has spoken of Macaulay as "stamping" through 
the fields of literature, and the phrase admirably pictures 
the energetic Philistinism of the critical dogmatist. It 
was in this spirit that England first received the poetry 
of a man who has been, and is, one of the noblest voices 
in the literary life of the century. The critics simply 
"stamped" upon his writings; and not merely howled 
derision on them, but taught his countrymen everywhere 
to receive his name with guffaws of brutal ridicule. 

In considering the works and influence of Wordsworth, 
we are bound to take full cognizance of the peculiarities 
of his own character and the events of his own life. 
With all poets it is necessary to do this, but with Words- 
worth most of all, because everything he has written is 
deeply colored with his own individuality. He has writ- 
ten little that is impersonal; across almost every page 
there is projected the huge shadow of his own peculiar 
personality. While other poets have gone to history or 
mythology for their themes, Wordsworth found his within 
himself, or in the simple surroundings of one of the sim- 
plest and most uneventful of lives. He brooded over the 
"abysmal deeps of personality," and from them he drew 
the inspiration of his noblest poetry. Sometimes this 
superb egotism of Wordsworth is irritating, and often he 
becomes tedious by attaching enormous importance to the 
very slightest influences which have helped to form his 
mind, or the most trivial incidents which have composed 
its record. "The Prelude," which is one of his longest 
poems, simply describes the growth of an individual mind, 
and, among many passages of profound thought and 



William Wordsworth 3 

beauty, contains others that are both tedious and trivial, 
and are tedious because they are trivial. It is because 
Wordsworth always found the impulse of poetry within 
himself that it is impossible to understand his writings 
without a clear understanding of the significance of his 
life. He boldly declared that he must be taken as a 
teacher or as nothing. He was no fitful singer of an idle 
day; he believed he had a message to deliver, as truly as 
ever ancient seer or prophet had. For this reason Words- 
worth fulfills, more perfectly than any other modern poet, 
the ideal conception of the bard. According to some 
philologists, "minister" and "minstrel" spring from the 
same root, and convey the same idea. Tlie true poet is 
the bard, the seer, the minister; he has a divine ordina- 
tion and is sacred by a divine anointing; he is a 
consecrated spirit, selected and commissioned for the 
performance of a divine behest. This was Wordsworth's 
view of the function of the poet, and he endeavored to 
fulfill it. This is what he meant when he said that vows 
were made for him, and that he must be considered as a 
teacher or nothing. This is the secret of that prophetic 
force which throbs in his best verses, and which gives 
them a subtle and enduring charm. They are the expres- 
sion of an austere and separated soul, of a spirit which 
dwells amid inaccessible heights of devout vision, and 
speaks with the accent of one who knows the peace of 
lofty and satisfying purposes. 

This claim of Wordsworth's — to be considered as a 
teacher or as nothing — was a new claim to the critics of 
fifty years ago, and was undoubtedly one cause, and per- 
haps the main cause, of their prolonged and bitter hostility. 
We shall see hereafter precisely what Wordsworth meant 



4 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

by the claim and how he has buih up a philosophy which 
is its justification. But in the first instance the claim 
was based almost as much upon the literary form of his 
work as on its philosophic qualities and upon a theory of 
literary composition which he himself has stated and devel- 
oped in his prefaces with great fullness. What was that 
theory.'' Briefly put, it amounted to this: Wordsworth 
complained that the commonly accepted theory of poetry 
was both false and vicious. It had practically invented a 
dialect of its own, which was as far as possible removed 
from the orchnary dialect of the common people. It was 
artificial and stilted — the cant of a coterie, and not the 
language of ordinary life. Its spirit also was wholly 
wrong and mistaken : it had lost hold on common life, and 
scorned it as low and mean; it had lost hold on nature, 
because it did not know how to speak of her except in 
ancient rhetorical phrases, which were the bronze coinage 
of poetry, defaced by use, and whatever might once have 
been true or just about them was now depraved and muti- 
lated by unthinking use. Wordsworth held that there was 
sufficient interest in common life to inspire the noblest 
achievements of the poet, and that nature must be observed 
with unflinching fidelity if she was to be described with 
truth or freshness. He asks why should poetry be 

A history only of departed things, 

Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 

For the discerning intellect of Man, 

When wedded to this goodly universe 

In love and holy passion, shall find these 

A simple produce of the common day. 

I, long before the blissful hour arrives, 

Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal hour 

Of tliis great consummation ; and, by words 



William Wordsworth 5 

Which speak of nothing inore than what we are, 
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims 
How exquisitely the individual mind 
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
Of the whole species) to the external world 
Is fitted ; — and how exquisitely too — 
Theme this but little heard of among men — 
The external world is fitted to the mind. 

In this noble passage from the "Recluse," the gist of 
Wordsv^orth's peculiar view of poetry is to be found. He 
announces a return to simplicity, to simple themes and 
simple language, and teaches that in the simplest sights of 
life and nature there is sufficient inspiration for the true 
poet. He speaks of nothing more than what we are, and 
is prepared to write nothing that is not justified by the 
actual trutl'fof things. He sets himself against that 
species of poetry which finds its impulse and its public in 
theatrical passion and morbid or exaggerated sentiment. 
To him the "meanest flower that blows can give thoughts 
that do often lie too deep for tears," and by preserving 
his soul in austere simplicity he aims at producing a 
species of poetry which will affect men by its truth rather 
than its passion, and will affect even the lowliest of men, 
because it is expressed in the plain and unadorned language 
of common life. 

How truly Wordsworth adhered to the great principles 
here enunciated his life and work declare, but it will also 
be apparent that his theory of poetic expression hopelessly 
broke down after a short trial. It may be said, indeed, 
that occasionally even his theory of poetry itself breaks 
down. In the attempt to be simple he becomes childish, 



6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and in his selection of the commonest themes he more 
than once has selected themes which no human genius 
could make poetic. In the main, however, the principles 
of thought which he enunciated he strictly observed 
throughout a long life, and his noblest effects have been 
produced within the limitations he invented, and which he 
was content to obey. But when we consider the ques- 
tion of his literary expression, we at once perceive that he 
does not use the language of common life, nor was it pos- 
sible that he should. The vocabulary of the educated 
man is far wider than the vocabulary of the illiterate, and 
the vocabulary of the great poet is usually the fullest of 
all. Wordsworth simply could not help himself when he 
used forms of expression which the ploughman and peddler 
could never have used. It was in vain that he said: "I 
have proposed to myself to imitate, and as far as is pos- 
sible to adopt, the very language of men. I have taken 
as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction 
as others ordinarily take to produce it." In poems like 
"The Idiot Boy," or "The Thorn," he certainly fulfills 
this purpose; he has so entirely succeeded in avoiding 
poetic diction that he has produced verses which by no 
stretch of literary charity could be called poetry at all. 
Wordsworth's noblest poetry is noble in direct contra- 
vention of his own theory of poetry, and is a pertinent 
illustration of the futility of all such theories to bind men 
t^ of real genius. His theory is, that true poetry should be 
merely "the language really spoken by men, with meter 
superadded," and he asks us, "What other distinction 
from prose would we have ? ' ' We reply that from the 
true poet we expect melody and magic of phrase — the gift 
of musical expression which can make words a power 



William Wordsworth 7 

equal to music, in producing exquisite sensations on the 
ear, and which is a still higher power than music, because 
it can directly produce noble thoughts and passions in the 
soul. If Wordsworth had only given us the language of 
prose with meter superadded, we should not be reading 
his pages to-day with ever- fresh delight. It is because 
he discards his own theory of poetic expression, and has 
given us many verses written in language unmatched for 
purity and melody of phrase, and wholly different from 
the "language really spoken by men," that we have judged 
him a great poet. 

When we consider the vehemence of that ridicule with 
which Wordsworth was greeted, and the virulence of that 
criticism with which he was pursued for nearly half a 
century, it is necessary, therefore, to bear in mind how 
absurd this theOry of poetic expression is, and how doubly 
absurd it must have seemed to those who were the critical 
authorities of his day. And it must also be recollected 
that Wordsworth pressed his theory in season and out of 
season. The temper of mind which made him attach an 
overweening importance to the slightest incidents in his 
own intellectual development made him also blind to the 
relative values of his poems. He deliberately chose poems 
like "The Idiot Boy" — which were written in his worst 
style — and solemnly insisted on their significance as illus- 
trative of his theory. If he had had any sense of humor, 
he would have perceived how absurd this was; but in 
humor Wordsworth was singularly deficient. There was 
a stiffness of controversial temper about him which refused 
any parley with the enemy. The consequence was, that 
the more strenuously Wordsworth insisted on the value of 
his worst poems, the more blind men became to the 



8 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

supreme excellence of his best. They accepted his worst 
poems as typical of his genius, and it was easy to turn 
them into ridicule. If poetry were, indeed, only prose 
with meter superadded, it was obvious that any prose-man 
could become a poet at will; and the facile retort rose to 
the lips that Wordsworth had justified his theory by writ- 
ing prose under the delusion that it was poetry. The 
astonishing thing is, that men of genuine critical ability 
were so slow to recognize that among many poems which 
were little better than prose cut up into metrical lengths, 
there were other poems of great and enduring excellence, 
which the greatest poets of all time might be proud to 
claim. However, a truce has long since been called to 
such contentions. No one cares much to-day what par- 
ticular poetic fads Wordsworth may have advocated; the 
fact that has gradually grown clear and clearer to the 
world is, that in Wordsworth we possess a poet of pro- 
found originality and of supreme genius, and his greatness 
is generally recognized. It is also generally recognized 
that, more than any other modern poet, Wordsworth has 
expressed in his poems a noble philosophy; and it is to 
the study of that philosophy that I invite those who would 
read Wordsworth with a seeing eye and an understanding 
heart. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. How was the poetry of Wordsworth received by the 
critics of his day? 

2. Why is it very necessary to study Wordswortli's life in 
connection with his poetry? 

3. What was Wordsworth's idea of the function of a poet? 

4. What fault did he find with much of the poetry of his 
time? 



William Wordsworth 9 

5. What were his theories as to what poetry should be? 

6. How did he fall short of his own theory of poetic expres- 
sion? 

7. How does this explain in some measure the views of his 
critics? 

8. What important qualities of his work did many of his 
critics fail to see? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ward's English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. W. Church, 
and Selections. 

The Poets and the Poetry of the Century. A. H. Miles. 
Vol. I. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.) 

Wordsworthiana. Papers read to the Wordsworth Society. 
Edited by Wm. Knight. 

Poems of IVordsworth. Chosen and selected, with intro- 
ductory essay, by Matthew Arnold. (Golden Treasury Series.) 

Wordsworth's Complete Poetical Works, i Vol. Edited 
by John Morley. 

William Wordsworth. A biographical sketch, with selec- 
tions from his writings. A. J. Symington. 

Wordswortlis Poetry. Francis Jeffrey. (Contributions to 
the Edinburgh Review, 1807-1814. These are the most famous 
of the early attacks on Wordsworth.) 



CHAPTER II 

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDS- 
WORTH'S LIFE AND HIS POETRY 

I have already said that with Wordsworth, more than 
with most poets, the hfe of the poet must be considered 
in connection with his poetry. Let us now look at this 
subject a little more closely. Wordsworth was born on 
the borders of that Lake Country which he loved so well, 
at Cockermouth, on April 7, 1770. From his boyhood 
he was familiar with English mountain scenery, and the 
subduing spirit of its beauty touched his earliest life. He 
himself tells us — 

Nothing at that time 
So welcome, no temptation half so dear 
As that which urged me to a daring feat. 
Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms and dizzy crags, 
And tottering towers : I loved to stand and read 
Their looks forbidding, read and disobey. 

It is a vivid picture of the wild child of Nature, awed and 
yet exhilarated in her presence, which Wordsworth paints 
m these lines. The boyish Wordsworth described in the 
"Recluse" is a true boy, touched more perhaps than a 
boy should be with a sense of mystery in nature, but not 
distinguished by any unwholesome precocity or unnatural 
meditativeness. The awe of nature seems to have been a 
feeling early developed in him, and it never left him. He 
tells us how one day while nutting he penetrated into a 



Wordsworth's Life and His Poetry i i 

distant solitude of the wood, where the silence and sense 
of sacredness were so profound that he hastily retreated, 
with the feeling that he had invaded a sanctuary. But in 
other passages, such as the above, the idea left upon the 
mind is of a sturdy youth, rejoicing in his strength of limb 
and sureness of foot, and taking a thoroughly healthy 
delight in outdoor life. He has the wholesome blood of 
the Cumberland dalesman in his veins, and loves the moun- 
tains as only those love them whose life has thriven beneath 
their shadows; and even as a boy he learned to feel some- 
thing of that healing serenity which Nature breathes into 
the soul that loves her. He felt that "whatever of high- 
est he can hope, it is hers to promise; all that is dark in 
him she must purge into purity; all that is failing in him 
she must strengthen into truth; in her, through all the 
world's warfare, he must find his peace"; or, to quote his 
own memorable words: 

But me hath Nature tamed, and bade to seek 
For other agitations, or be calm ; 
Hath dealt with me as with a turbulent stream, 
Some nursling of the mountains, which she leads 
Through quiet meadows, after he has learnt 
His strength, and had his triumph and his joy, 
His desperate course of tumult and of glee. 

The first noticeable thing, therefore, is that Words- 
worth was a true "nursling of the mountains," and the 
influence of natural beauty and pastoral life was one of 
the earliest influences which shaped his mind. He had 
no love of cities, and knew little of them. When he spoke 
of them it was with reluctance and compassion; he 
brooded 



12 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Above the fierce confederate storm 
Of sorrow, barricadoed ever more 
Within the walls of cities; 

for it seemed to him that cities w^ere the natural homes of 
sorrow, and the open fields the true abodes of peace. He 
had a passionate love for an outdoor life, and his mind 
naturally lent itself to that deep meditativeness which is a 
common characteristic of those who spend many hours of 
every day in the loneliness of nature. Strangely enough, 
in one who is known to fame as a man of letters, it was 
nevertheless true that the three things most difficult for 
him to do, to the very end of his life, were reading, writ- 
ing, and the toil of literary composition. When he is a 
young man of thirty-three, he writes to Sir George Beau- 
mont that he never has a pen in his hand for five minutes 
without becoming a bundle of uneasiness, and experiencing 
an insufferable oppression. "Nine-tenths of my verses," 
he writes forty years later, "have been murmured out in 
the open air." When a visitor at Rydal Mount asked to 
see Wordsworth's study, the reply was that he could see 
his "library, where he keeps his books, but his study is 
out of doors." The peculiarities thus described are the 
typical peculiarities of the sturdy dalesman, and such in 
many respects Wordsworth was to the end of his days. 
When he described the peasants and farmers of the moun- 
tains, it was no fanciful love that attracted him to them: 
he spoke of men whom he thoroughly understood, because 
he was physically akin to them. The sturdy fiber of his 
mind, his intellectual honesty, his independence, his power 
of contemplation, his sufficiency — not the coarse sufficiency 
of the vulgar egoist, but the habitual sufficiency of a well- 
poised and self-reliant nature — all these were the distin- 



Wordsworth's Life and His Poetry 13 

guishing. characteristics of his neighbors, but touched in 
him with a loftier spirit, and put to higher purposes. 
Even in his face and figure — in the ruggedness of the one 
and the firmness and sturdiness of the other — much of this 
was discernible. It was a figure that showed worst in 
drawing-rooms, as though consciously alien to them; a 
face that seemed almost vacant to the nimble-minded 
dwellers in cities, but which glowed with true illumination 
and nobility among the sounds and visions of his native 
country-side. The mold in which Wordsworth was cast 
was a strong one. His nature was slow, and deep, and 
steadfast; what he was at thirty he practically was at 
seventy, save that there had been an inevitable stiffening 
of ideas, and an equally inevitable growth of self-reliant 
sufficiency. 

Let any one try to picture to himself the leading char- 
acteristics of the fife of a Cumbrian dalesman, and, if he 
pleases, let him go to the poems of Wordsworth himself 
for materials, and he will find that the life so outlined will 
be, above all things, independent, self-respecting, and self- 
sufficient, frugal without parsimony, pious without formal- 
ity, and simple without boorishness. It is a wholesome 
life of humble industries and simple pleasures, and such a 
life was not merely to Wordsworth the ideal life, but it 
was an ideal which he himself perfectly fulfilled. And 
let any one think again of the sort of life which found 
favor with the poets of his day, and the sort of life they 
themselves lived — Byron with his bitter misanthropy, 
Shelley with his outraged sensitiveness, Keats with his 
recoil from a sordid world to the ideal paradise of Greek 
mythology, Moore with his cockney glitter, Coleridge with 
his remote and visionary splendor — let him think of this. 



14 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and he will see how strange a thing it was to such a world 
that a Cumbrian dalesman's life should have been thrust 
before it as an ideal human life, and that, too, by a man 
who had himself chosen such a life for himself, and had 
found in it tranquillity and satisfaction. In that age there 
were only two poets who had shown any genuine love of 
Nature in her daily and common manifestations, and had 
written verses which might have "been murmured out in 
the open air." These were Burns and Scott, and it is 
noticeable that for both Wordsworth felt a deep attraction. 
In both there is a supreme healthfulness, a sense of robust 
enjoyment in fresh air and simple sights. When Scott 
describes nature it is always with a true eye for color, and 
Burns's poems touch us by their artless rusticity not less 
than by their artistic beauty. Wordsworth himself has 
told us how "admirably has Burns given way to these 
impulses of nature, both with reference to himself and in 
describing the condition of others"; and it was the simple 
humanness of the Ayrshire farmer that endeared him to a 
poet who valued more than anything else simplicity and 
virtue in human nature. But where Wordsworth differed 
from all other poets of his day was that he had a conscious 
ideal of what human life might be made, through simplicity 
of desire and communion with nature, and he resolutely 
set himself to the fulfillment of his ideal. Especially was 
the dalesman's independence and self-sufficiency marked 
in him. He knew what it was to be a law unto himself, 
and found in his own nature the true impulses of action. 
And so he writes: "These two things, contradictory as 
they seem, must go together — manly dependence and manly 
independence, manly reliance and manly self-rehance." 
And again: "Let the poet first consult his own heart, as 



Wordsworth's Life and His Poetry 15 

I have done, and leave the rest to posterity — to, I hope, 
an improving' posterity. I have not written down to the 
level of superficial observers or unthinking minds." The 
spirit of these words reveals the man, and the man so 
revealed could only have thriven in a region where sim- 
plicity, and manliness, and rugged honesty were the prime 
virtues and common heritage of daily life. 

The great turning-point in the life of Wordsworth was 
the year 1795, when his sister Dora joined him and 
became henceforth the chosen comrade of his intellectual 
life, not less than the confidant of his emotions. The 
period. precedmg had been spent somewhat aimlessly, and 
is memorable only for the foreign travel Wordsworth had 
indulged in, his hopes of France, and his subsequent dis- 
illusionment and despair. Like every poet of his day, save 
Keats and Scott, he was violently affected by the French 
Revolution, and was caught within the whirl of its frantic 
fascination. But with the Reign of Terror his hopes of 
world-wide regeneration perished, and a sullen and im- 
penetrable despair fell upon him. He was indeed slow to 
give up hope, and when England declared war upon 
France he flamed out in indignant denunciation of what 
seemed to him a disgraceful outrage. The effect of these 
events on his poetry we shall best see when we come to 
consider his patriotic poems. In the mean time, what we 
have to observe is that in 1795 Wordsworth was as un- 
settled as man could well be, and was without any true 
aim or work in life. He was, to quote Mr. F.W. H. Myers, 
"a rough and somewhat stubborn young man, who, in 
nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alternately to idle 
without grace and to study without advantage, and it 
might well have seemed incredible that he could have any- 



1 6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

thing new or valuable to communicate to manicind." It 
was from this state of lethargic aimlessness that Dora 
Wordsworth redeemed him. She revealed to him the true 
bent of his nature, and discovered to him his true powers. 
She led him back to the healing solitude of nature, where 
alone, as she justly perceived, his mind could find a fit 
environment, and his powers could ripen into greatness. 
She understood him better than he understood himself. 
She knew that he was unfitted for public life, or the con- 
duct of affairs, but that there was in him that which might 
be of infinite service to the world, if fitting opportunity 
were given for its development. And she judged that 
nowhere so well as in the beloved environment of his native 
mountains would that spark of ethereal fire which pos- 
sessed him be kindled into a living and animating flame. 
Some years were yet to elapse before he finally settled at 
Grasmere, but they were years passed in seclusion, during 
which he gradually gave himself up to that appointed task 
of poetic toil to which he felt himself divinely consecrated. 
It meant for him a practical renunciation of the world. 
He had but the scantiest means of subsistence, and knew 
well that such a life as he now contemplated must be 
almost a peasant's life, lived upon a peasant's frugal fare 
and in a peasant's mean surroundings. When he turned 
his back upon great cities, and steadily set his face toward 
the English mountains, he resolutely shut the door upon 
all hopes of brilliant worldly success, upon all the natural 
hopes of advancement in life which a man of culture and 
education may legitimately entertain. 

His only guide in this most difficult hour was the need 
and impulse of his own nature. He felt that in the soli- 
tude of nature there was peace, and there only was a life 



Wordsworth's Life and His Poetry 17 

of plain living and high thinking possible. All he knew 
was that the common ideals of life did not satisfy him, 
and he exclaimed: 

The wealthiest man amongst us is the best ; 
No grandeur now in nature or in book 
Delights us. 

He had learned the great lesson of living, not for things 
temporal, but for things eternal; he had set himself above 
all to be true to his own self, and he had the rare daring 
of being absolutely faithful to the voice of this supreme 
conviction. Any greatness which attaches to Words- 
worth's character directly springs from this spiritual hon- 
esty of purpose. The noblest qualities of his poetry, all 
the qualities indeed which differentiate and distinguish it, 
and give it a lofty isolation in English literature, were the 
natural result of this temper of spirit and method of life. 
There, far from the fevered life of cities, where the free 
winds blew, and the spacious silence taught serenity; 
there, in the daily contemplation of simple life and natural 
beauty among his own mountains — the bonds of custom 
fell from Wordsworth's spirit, and he became enfranchised 
with a glorious liberty. Strength returned to him, clear- 
ness and resoluteness of spirit, sanity and joy of mind. 
The great lesson which he was consecrated to expound 
was the nobleness of unworldly and simple life, and such 
lessons could only be learned, much less taught, by a life 
which was itself infinitely removed from the vulgar scram- 
ble for wealth and the insane thirst for social power. It 
is not too much to say that it is to Dora Wordsworth that 
England owes the precious gift of her brother's genius. 
She recognized it when he himself was dubious; she 



1 8 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

taught him how to collect his powers and develop them; 
she encouraged him when almost every other voice was 
hostile, and finally, she taught him that serene confidence 
in himself and in his mission, which made him say to his 
few friends when the public contempt and apathy of his 
time seemed universal and unbearable: "Make yourselves 
at rest respecting me; I speak the truths the world must 
feel at last." 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. How was Wordsworth's youth influenced by his sur- 
roundings? 

2. In what respects was he a part of the rural society in 
which he lived? 

3. How did Wordsworth's ideal of life compare with that 
of his fellow-poets? 

4. Why was Wordsworth especially attracted to Burns and 
Scott? 

5. How was he affected by the events of the French Revo- 
lution? 

6. What important influence did Dora Wordsworth have 
upon him? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ward' s English Poets. Vol. I\\ Essay by R. W. Church, 
and Selections. 

Dorothy Wordsworth. Edmund Lee. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.) 

Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by William 
Knight. 

Hours in a Library. (Wordsworth's Ethics.) Third Series. 
Leslie Stephen. 



CHAPTER III 

WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND 

MAN 

I have spoken of Wordsworth as having a new and 
original philosophy to unfold, a new and individual view 
of nature to expound. What, then, was that view ? The 
love of nature is to be found in all the English poets, from 
Chaucer downward. In Wordsworth's own day both 
Byron and Shelley were writing poems thoroughly impreg- 
nated with the love of nature. If we eliminated from 
English poetry all the passages which deal with the charm 
and glory of nature, we should have destroyed all that is 
sweetest, freshest, and most characteristic in it. What 
is there, then, in Wordsworth's treatment of nature which 
differs from the poetry of those who have gone before 
him .'' It is perilous to be too positive where many fine 
and delicate distinctions are involved; but, speaking 
generally, it may be said that Wordsworth differs from all 
other poets in the stress he puts upon the moral influences 
of nature. To Byron nature was the great consoler in 
the hour of his, revolt against the folly of man, and he 
found in her, not merely hospitality, but a certain exhila- 
ration which fed the fierce defiance of his heart and 
armed him with new strength for the fight. To Shelley 
nature is more of a personality than to Byron, but it is an 
ethereal and lovely presence, a veiled splendor, kindling 
sweet ardor in the heart and exercising an intoxicating 

19 



20 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

magic on the mind. But with Wordsworth the idea of 
the living personahty of Nature is a definite reahty. He 
loves her as he might love a mistress, and communes with 
her as mind may commune with mind. To him she is a 
vast embodied thought, a presence not merely capable 
of inspiring delightful ardor, but of elevating man by 
noble discipline. Take, for instance, his "Sonnet on 
Calais Beach": 

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; 
The holy time is quiet as a nun 
Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 

Is sinking down in its tranquiUity ; 

The gentleness of heaven is on the sea: 
Listen! the mighty Being is awake, 
And doth with his eternal motion make 

A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 

Or take his conception of human life in the presence of 
the everlastingness of nature: 

Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence. 

Or ponder the spirit of the well-known verses: 

The outward shows of sky and earth, 

Of hill and valley he has viewed ; 
And impulses of deeper birth 

Have come to him in solitude. 

In common things that round us lie 
Some random truths he can impart — 

The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 

Or mark how he replies to the restlessness of life which is 
divorced from habitual intercourse with nature: 



Wordsworth's V^iew of Nature and Man 21 

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 

Of things forever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come. 

But we must still be seeking ? 

Nor less I deem that there are powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress; 

That we can feed this mind of ours 
Into a wise passiveness. 

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings ; 

He, too, is no mean preacher ; 
Come forth into the light of things — 

Let Nature be your teacher. 

One impulse of a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man. 
Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can. 

In these verses what most strikes us is the vividness of 
Wordsworth's conception of nature as endowed with per- 
sonality — "the mighty Being,", and the emphasis with 
which he declares that nature is a teacher whose wisdom 
we can learn if we will, and without which any human life 
is vain and incomplete. 

An artist, who is also a teacher of art, has laid down 
the rule that in painting landscape what we want is not the 
catalogue of the landscape, but the emotion of the artist 
in painting it. This is the artistic theory of the impres- 
sionist school, and it may be said that in this sense Words- 
worth was an impressionist. Such a poet as Thomson 
gives us in his "Seasons" the mere catalogue of nature, 
and as a catalogue it is excellent. If the effects of nature 
were to be put up to auction, no catalogue could serve us 
better than Thomson's "Seasons." But what Thomson 
cannot give us, and what Wordsworth does give us, is the 



22 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

impression which nature produces on his own spirit. He 
teaches us tliat between man and nature there is mutual 
consciousness and mystic intercourse. It is not for noth- 
ing God has set man in this world of sound and vision: it 
is in the power of nature to penetrate his spirit, to reveal 
him to himself, to communicate to him divine instruc- 
tions, to lift him into spiritual life and ecstasy. The poem 
of "The Daffodils" is simply a piece of lovely word-paint- 
ing till we reach the lines — 

They flash upon the inward eye, 
Which is the bliss of solitude ; 

and it is in those lines the real spirit of the poem speaks. 
There was something in that sight of the daffodils, dan- 
cing in jocund glee, that kindled a joy, an intuition, a hope 
in the poet's mind, and through the vision an undying 
mipulse of delight and illumination reached him. Words- 
worth does not indulge in the "poetic fallacy." He does 
not take his mood to Nature and persuade himself that she 
reflects it; but he goes to Nature with an open mind, and 
leaves her to create the mood in him. He does not ask 
her to echo him; but he stands docile in her presence, and 
asks to be taught of her. To persuade ourselves that 
Nature mirrors our mood, giving gray skies to our grief, 
and the piping of glad birds in answer to the joy-bells of 
our hope, is not to take a genuine delight in Nature. It is 
to make her our accomplice rather than our instructress; 
our mimic, not our mistress. Many poets have done this, 
and nothing is commoner in current poetry. The original- 
ity of Wordsworth is, that he never thinks of Nature in 
any other way than as a mighty presence, before whom 
he stands silent, like a faithful high-priest, who waits in 



Wordsworth's View of Nature and Man 23 

solemn expectation for the whisper of enhghtenment and 
wisdom. 

Let us turn to one of his earhest poems, the "Lines 
ComposedatTintern Abbey," July 13, 1798, and we shall 
see how clearly defined in Wordsworth's mind this con- 
ception of nature was, even at the commencement of his 
career. Wordsworth was not yet thirty, and had not yet 
recognized his true vocation in life; but nevertheless, all 
that he afterward said about nature is uttered in outline 
in these memorable lines. He speaks of the "tranquil 
restoration," the sensations sweet, "felt in the blood and 
felt along the heart," which nature had already wrought 
in him. He has peace, 

While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of song, 
We see into the life of things. 

The mere boyish love of nature, when the sounding cata- 
ract haunted him like a passion, he characterizes as one of 
the "glad animal movements" of the boy; now he has 
perceived how nature not merely works delight in the 
blood, but flashes illumination on the soul. 

F'or I have learned 
To look on Nature, not as in the hours 
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of somethmg far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 



24 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 

A lover of the meadows, and the woods, 

And mountains ; and of all that we behold 

From this round earth ; and of all the mighty world 

Of eye and ear, both what they half create 

And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 

In Nature and the language of the sense 

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. 

The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul, 

Of all my moral being. 

We have only to compare this passage with such poems 
as Byron's "Address to the Ocean" or Shelley's "Ode 
to the West Wind" to see how great is the difference 
between Wordsworth's view of nature and theirs, and how 
profoundly original Wordsworth's view is. There is a 
subtle power in Wordsworth's verses which seems to 
breathe the very spirit of Nature, and to interpret her. 
We entirely lose sight of the revealer in the revelation; 
we pass out of the sphere of Wordsworth's mood into the 
very mood and heart of Nature; we feel the presence of 
something deeply interfused through all the inanimate 
world. The world indeed is no longer dead to us, but 
animate, and we feel the spirit and motion of Nature like 
the actual contact of a living and a larger soul. Words- 
worth is thus not so much the poet as the high-priest of 
Nature, and the feeling he creates in us is not so much 
delight as worghip. 

One effect of this ardent love of nature in Wordsworth 
is, that he excels all other poets in the fidelity of his 
descriptions, the minute accuracy of his observation of 
natural beauty. His eye for nature is always fresh and 



Wordsworth's View of Nature and Man 25 

true, and what he sees he describes with an admirable 
reaHsm. His sense of form and color is also perfect, and 
in nothing is he so great an artist as in his power of con- 
veying in a phrase the exact truth of the things he sees. 
When he speaks of the voice of the stock-dove as "buried 
among trees," he uses the only word that could completely 
convey to us the idea of seclusion, the remote depth of 
greenwood in which the clove loves to hide herself. The 
star-shaped shadow of the daisy cast upon the stone is 
noted also with the same loving accuracy, and can only be 
the result of direct observation. Nothing escaped his 
vigilance, and his sense of sound was as perfect as his 
power of vision. The wild wind-swept summit of a moun- 
tain-pass could hardly be better painted than in this word- 
picture: 

The single sheep, and that one blasted tree, 
And the bleak music of that old stone wall. 

We hear, as we read these lines, the wind whistling 
through the crevices of the stone walls of Westmoreland, 
and by the magic of this single phrase we feel at once the 
desolation of the scene, and we catch its spirit. For, 
after all, it is not in the power of the most accurate 
description of itself to create emotion in us; it is the emo- 
tion of the poet we need to interpret for us the spirit of 
what he sees, and this is just what Wordsworth does for 
us. He scorned what he called taking an inventory of 
nature, and said that nature did not permit it. His com- 
ment on a brilliant poet was: "He should have left his 
pencil and note-book at home, fixed his eye as he walked 
with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and 
taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. 



i6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

He would have discovered that while much of what he had 
admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely 
obliterated; that which remained — the picture surviving 
in his mind — would have presented the ideal and essential 
truth of the scene, and done so in a large part by discard- 
ing much which, though in itself striking, was not charac- 
teristic." This was Wordsworth's own method. Though 
unsurpassed in the fidelity of his observation, he never 
relies on observation alone for his interpretation of nature. 
When he has observed he allows the picture of what he 
has seen to sink quietly into the memory, and he broods 
above it in silent joy. The result is, that when the hour 
comes to combine his materials in a poem, they are already 
sifted for us, and are saturated with sentiment. Many of 
the noblest passages in Wordsworth might be thus de- 
scribed as observation touched with emotion — unusually 
accurate observation touched with the finest and purest 
emotion. 

Another direct effect of Wordsworth's view of nature 
is his view of man. He began life with the most ardent 
hopes for the moral regeneration of mankind, and it was 
only with bitter reluctance he renounced them, in the 
frantic recoil which the excesses of the French Revolution 
produced. From the bitterness of that trouble, as we have 
seen, he was rescued by his sister Dora, and going back 
to the calm of nature, he found a truer view of mankind. 
He believed that he had put his finger on the real secret of 
the unsatisfied passions and misery of mankind when he 
taught that man, divorced from living intercourse with 
nature, could not but be restless and unhappy. Man was 
set in this world of nature because the world of nature 
was necessary to his well-being, nor were spiritual sanity 



Wordsworth's View of Nature and Man 27 

and delight possible without contact with nature. In this 
view he was confirmed when he found that in the remote 
dales of the English Lake District human life attained a 
robust virtue denied to the dwellers in great cities. He 
saw that the essentials of a really lofty and happy life 
were few, and that they were found in the greatest profu- 
sion where life was simplest and contact with nature was 
habitual. His faith in mankind returned, and man again 
became 

An object of delight, 
Of pure imagination and of love. 

Set in his proper environment of nature, breathing clear 
air, looking on refreshing visions of glory and delight, 
Wordsworth saw that man was at his best, and he regarded 
him with genuine reverence. His panacea for the healing 
of his country was a return to nature, and it was in pathetic 
reproach he wrote: 

The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ! 

We have given away our hearts, a sordid boon ! 

There is no poet who shows so great a reverence for man 
as man. Lowliness and poverty cannot hide from him the 
great qualities of heart and character, which the selfish and 
unthinking never see. He sings the homely sanctities and 
virtues of the poor. Human nature is to him a sacred 
thing, and even in its frailest and humblest forms is re- 
garded with gentleness and sympathy. And the real source 
of Wordsworth's reverence for man lies in his reverence 
for nature. It is the constant and purging vision of nature 
which enables him to perceive how mean are the cares with 



28 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

which those who are rich burden themselves, and how 
noble, and even joyous, men can be under the stress of 
penury and labor, if they let nature lead them and exalt 
them. 

The spirit of this teaching is nowhere more happily 
expressed than in the lovely lines which occur in the con- 
clusion of the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle": 

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 

His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
The silence which is in the starry sky, 

The sleep that is among the lonely hills. 

These were the agencies which had softened, soothed, 
and tamed the fiery heart of Clifford, and it was by the 
same simple ministration he himself had been led into 
settled peace. 

It may, indeed, be doubted whether it is possible to 
understand the full significance of Wordsworth's poetry in 
any other environment than that in which it was produced. 
So at least thought James Macdonell, when he wrote: 
"What blasts of heavenly sunshine, as if blown direct from 
the gates of some austerely Puritan paradise ! What gusts 
of air, touched with the cold rigor of the mountain peak! 
What depth of moralizing, touched with the hues of a 
masculine gloom! What felicity of diction, clothing in 
immortal brevity of phrase the deepest aspirations of the 
brave! Never did I read Wordsworth with such full 
delight, because never had I so charged my mind with the 
spirit of the mountains which were the food of his soul." 

What Burns did for the Scotch peasant, Wordsworth 
has done for the shepherds and the husbandmen of Eng- 
land. But he has done more than illustrate the virtues of 



Wordsworth's View of Nature and Man 29 

a class: from the study of peasant life, set amid the splen- 
dor, and vivified by the influence of nature, he attained a 
profound faith in man himself, and a reverent understand- 
ing of the inherent grandeur of all human life. 



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. How did Byron's and Shelley's views of nature differ 
from that of Wordsworth? 

2. Give illustrations of his idea of nature as a personality? 

3. Compare his view of nature with that of Thomson. 

4. What is the difference between the idea of nature as an 
"accomplice" and as a "mighty presence"? 

5. Illustrate this from the "Lines Composed at Tintern 
Abbey." 

6. Illustrate the faithfulness of his descriptions of nature. 

7. What was his comment on a poet who " took an inventory 
of nature "? 

8. What did he teach as to man's need of close contact with 
nature? 

g. Why does Wordsworth's poetry reveal more than the 
virtues of a class? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

lVar(fs English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. W. Church, 
and Selections. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.1 

Wordsworthiana. Papers read to the Wordsworth Society. 
Edited by Wm. Knight. 

Poetic Interpretation of Nature. (Wordsworth.) J. C. 
Shairp. 



CHAPTER IV 

WORDSWORTH'S PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL 
POEMS 

An excellent and eloquent critic, Professor Dowden, 
has spoken of Wordsworth's "uncourageous elder 
years," and has founded the phrase upon this sentence 
of Wordsworth's: "Years have deprived me of cour- 
age, in the sense which the word bears when applied 
by Chaucer to the animation of birds in springtime." 
A little reflection will, I think, show that this confes- 
sion of the poet hardly justifies the phrase of the critic. 
Nevertheless, it is a general impression that Wordsworth 
began life an ardent Radical and ended it as a stanch 
Conservative. If this were all, the phrase might be 
allowed to pass, but the impression such a phrase creates 
is, that Wordsworth not merely renounced his early hopes 
and creed, but grew apathetic toward the great human 
causes which stirred his blood in youth. Browning's fine 
poem of the "Lost Leader" has often been applied to 
Wordsworth, and it has been assumed in many quarters, 
with what degree of truth we do not know, that Browning 
had Wordsworth in his mind when he wrote that powerful 
and pathetic indictment. However this may be, nothing 
is commoner than the assumption that one result of 
Wordsworth's remote seclusion from the great stress of 
life was that he lost interest in public affairs, and cared 
little for the great movements of his day. Than this 

30 



Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political Poems 3 i 

assumption nothing can be falser. To say nothing of the 
prose writings of Wordsworth, few poets have given us a 
larger body of patriotic poetry, and poetry impregnated 
with politics, than Wordsworth. Perhaps it is because 
the finest poems of Wordsworth are those that deal with 
the emotions of man in the presence of nature that com- 
paratively little interest attaches to his patriotic poetry. 
Such poetry, however, Wordsworth wrote throughout his 
life, and if he was not altogether a political force, it is 
quite certain that he never ceased to take a keen interest 
in politics. He had national aims, and was full of the 
most ardent love of country. It may be well to recall to 
the minds of my readers this aspect of Wordsworth's life 
and influence. 

As regards the earlier part of his life, Wordsworth has 
left an abundant record of his thoughts in his prose writ- 
ings. No poet save Milton has written with so large a 
touch upon national affairs and has displayed so lofty 
a spirit. His prose does not indeed glow with so intense a 
passion, nor is it so gorgeous as Milton's, but it is ani- 
mated and inspired by the same spirit. And in its more 
passionate passages something of Milton's pomp of style 
is discernible — something of his overwhelming force of 
language and cogency of thought. Wordsworth's tract 
on the "Convention of Cintra" belongs to the same class 
of writings as Milton's "Areopagitica," and while not its 
equal in sustained splendor of diction, it is distinguished 
by the same breadth of view and eager patriotism. 
Wordsworth has himself defined excellence of writing as 
the conjunction of reason and passion, and judged by this 
test, Wordsworth's occasional utterances on politics attain 
a rare excellence. It would have been singular in such an 



32 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

age if any man who possessed emotion enough to be a poet 
had nothing to say upon the great events which were alter- 
ing the map of Europe. Wordsworth from the first never 
concealed his opinions on these subjects. He went as far 
as he could in apologizing for the errors of the French 
Revolution, when he said truly that "revolution is not the 
season of true liberty. ' ' The austerity which characterized 
his whole life characterizes the very temper of his apology 
for the excesses of the Revolution. He shed no tears over 
the execution of Louis. He laments a larger public calam- 
ity, "that any combination of circumstances should have 
rendered it necessary or advisable to veil for a moment the 
statutes of the laws, and that by such emergency the cause 
of twenty-five millions of people, I may say of the whole 
human race, should have been so materially injured. Any 
other sorrow for the death of Louis is irrational and 
weak." He is even ardent republican enough to argue 
for equality, and to say that in the perfect state "no dis- 
tinctions are to be admitted but such as have evidently for 
their object the general good." This last sentence strikes 
the keynote in much of the philosophy of Wordsworth. 
"Simplification was," as John Morley has observed, "the 
keynote of the revolutionary time." That lesson Words- 
worth thoroughly learned, and never forgot. It is the 
very essence of the democratic spirit to pierce beneath the 
artificial distinctions of a time and grasp the essential; to 
take man for what he is, not for what he seems to be; 
to reverence man wherever he is found, and to reverence 
not least the man who toils in the lowliest walks of life. 
If this be the spirit of democracy, then Wordsworth kept 
the democratic faith whole and undefiled. So far from 
repudiating" the political creed of his life, he spiritualized 



Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political Poems ^^ 

it, and lived in obedience to its essential elements all his 
life. That in later life he manifested an incapacity for 
the rapid assimilation of new ideas; that his notions 
stiffened, and his perceptions failed; that he opposed 
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill — is merely to 
say, in other words, that Wordsworth grew old. It is a 
rare spectacle, perhaps the rarest, to see a great mind 
resist the stiffening of age and retain its versatility and 
freshness of outlook in the last decades of life. Words- 
worth was never a versatile man and never had any marked 
capacity for the assimilation of new ideas. But how very 
far Wordsworth was from ever being a fossilized Tory we 
may judge by his own saying in later life: "I have no 
respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a good deal of the 
Chartist in me." However his political insight may have 
failed him in his apprehension of the party measures of 
his later life, it cannot be seriously questioned that Words- 
worth always remained true at heart to the cause of the 
people, and never swerved in his real reverence for man 
as man. 

The urgency of the political passion in Wordsworth 
can be felt all through the days of the great war, and per- 
haps the noblest record of that period is in the long series 
of sonnets which Wordsworth wrote between the years 
1803 and 1816. In the year 1 809 he wrote scarcely any- 
thing that was not related to the life of nations. It was 
then that he apostrophized Saragossa and lamented over 
the submission of the Tyrolese. And if few poets have 
written so largely on the current events of their day, it 
may certainly be added that no poet has showed a more 
cosmopolitan spirit. It was indeed a time when England 
was in closer touch with the struggling nationalities of the 



34 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Continent than ever before. A common calamity had 
drawn together all the peoples of Europe who still loved 
liberty. England had never breathed the spirit of so large 
a life as in those troublous days. She had never known 
a period of such intense suspense and united enthusiasm. 
The beacon-fire was built on every hill ; every village green 
resounded to the clang of martial drill; every port had its 
eager watchers, who swept the waste fields of sea with 
restless scrutiny. Children were sent to bed with all their 
clothes neatly packed beside them, in case the alarm of 
war should break the midnight silence; and invasion was 
for months an hourly fear. It was one of those moments 
of supreme peril and passion which come rarely in the 
life of nations — one of those great regenerating moments 
when factions perish and a nation rises into nobler life, 
and the stress of that great period is felt in every line that 
Wordsworth wrote. His patriotism was of that diviner 
kind which founds itself on principles of universal truth 
and righteousness. It was no splendid prejudice, no insu- 
larity of thought, no mere sentimental love of country; it 
gathered in its embrace the passions of Europe and 
pleaded in its strenuous eloquence the cause of the op- 
pressed throughout the world. This breadth of view 
which characterized Wordsworth's patriotism is its noblest 
characteristic. It is a catholic love of liberty which gives 
him spiritual comradeship with every man who has toiled 
or suffered for his country. And this spirit can find no 
fuller exemplification than in his noble sonnet, written in 
1802 : 



Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political Poems 35 

TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. 

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men! 

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough 

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now 
Pillowed in some dark dungeon's earless den; 
O miserable Chieftain! where and when 

Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not! do thou 

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow; 
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, 
Live, and take comfort! Thou hast left behind 

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; 
There's not a breathing of the common wind 

That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies; 

Thy friends are exultations, agonies. 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind. 

But catholic as Wordsworth's patriotic sympathies 
were, the noblest expressions of his patriotism are his 
addresses and appeals to his own countrymen. If in later 
life he did not discern the true spirit of his times, and 
unconsciously resisted the august spirit of progress, it was 
in part because his honest pride of country grew with his 
growth and strengthened with his age. He was loth to 
admit faults and flaws in a form of government which 
seemed to meet every just demand of liberty and order. 
Besides, the great hindrance to democratic development 
was to Wordsworth not discoverable in any error or 
defect of government, but in the defective method of life 
which his countrymen adopted. When he is called upon 
to judge the political measures of his day, his touch is not 
sure nor his discrimination wise; but when he estimates 
the tendencies of the social life of England he is always 
clear, cogent, and convincing. His social grasp is always 
surer than his political, and his finest sonnets are those in 



36 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

which he combines his social insight with patriotic pas- 
sion. Such a sonnet is this: 

When I have borne in memory what has tamed 
Great nations, how ennobling thoughts depart 
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert 

The student's bower for gold, some fear unnamed 

I had, my country! — am I to be blamed ? 
Now when I think of thee, and what thou art, 
Verily in the bottom of my hf art 

Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. 

For dearly must we prize thee, we who find 
In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ; 
• And I by my affection was beguiled. 
What wonder if a poet now and then. 

Among the many movements of his mind. 

Felt for thee as a lover or a child ? 

And this is a note which is struck again and again. In 
the hour of peril his countrymen rose to the supreme 
daring of the occasion. What he fears is, that the relax- 
ation of that intense moral strain may mean that national 
life may lose its saving salt of lofty purpose and sink into 
carnal contentment and repose. "Getting and spending 
we lay waste our powers, ' ' is the thought that frequently 
recurs in his later poems. He fears the enervation of 
prosperity more than the buffeting of adversity. When 
nations are surfeited with victory and peace, they are too 
apt to lose the Spartan temper of austere devotion to their 
country which made them great in warlike days. And 
why Wordswoth so often recurs to this thought is that 
his pride in his country has no bounds. For the nation 
which has saved the liberties of Europe to fall into inglori- 
ous self-indulgence would be the last calamity in the pos- 
sible tragedy of nations. It is in the hour when such 



Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political Poems 37 

fears beset him that he appeals to "Sidney, Marvel, 
Harrington," who 

Knew how genuine glory is put on, 

Taught us how rightfully a nation shone 

In splendor, what strength was that would not bend 

But in magnanimous meekness. 

It is then also he thinks of Milton, whose "soul was as a 
star and dwelt apart," and invokes that mighty shade 
which haunts the Puritan past of England — 

We are selfish men ; 
O, raise us up, return to us again. 
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 

And it is when the memory of that heroic past of Eng- 
land is most vivid to his mind that he touches his highest 
note of dignified and haughty pride, and scorns the 
thought 

That this most famous stream in bogs and sands 
Should perish! and to evil and to good 
Be lost forever. In our halls is hung 

Armoury of the invincible knights of old ; 
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 

That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 

Of earth's first blood ; have titles manifold. 

The patriotism of Wordsworth is not violent or fren- 
zied; it is comparatively restrained; but, for that very 
reason, in the moments of its highest utterance there is a 
depth and force in it such as few writers display. When 
habitually calm men break the barriers of reserve, there is 
something strangely impressive in their passion. There 
is nothing more impressive in Wordsworth, as indica- 
tive of the strength of his emotions, than these occasional 



38 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

bursts of exalted patriotism, and their force is heightened 
by the contrast they furnish to his habitual serenity of 
temper. 

There is one poem of Wordsworth's which stands out 
in particular prominence as the greatest of all his poems 
which express the spirit of patriotism; that is, the "Happy 
Warrior." This poem was written in the year 1806, and 
was inspired by the death of Nelson. It was in the 
autumn of the previous year that Nelson had fallen on the 
deck of the Victory, and the shock of sorrow and con- 
sternation which passed over England has never been 
equaled by any similar public calamity. Certainly the 
death of no individual has ever called forth so spontaneous 
and general a lamentation. Nelson was to the England 
of his day the very incarnation of manly courage and 
heroic virtue. The fascination of his name affected every 
class of society. He seemed to sum up in himself that 
reverence for duty which is so characteristic a feature of 
the English race. Between Nelson and Wordsworth 
there could be little in common save this bond of ardent 
patriotism, but that was sufficient to call forth from 
Wordsworth one of his finest poems. Just as we can 
specify certain poems which constitute the high-water 
mark of Wordsworth's genius in philosophic or lyric 
poetry, so we can confidently take this poem as his matur- 
est word in patriotic poetry. It breathes the very spirit 
of consecrated heroism. Some points of the poem were 
suggested by a more private sorrow — the loss at sea of his 
brother John; but it was out of the larger emotion occa- 
sioned by the death of Nelson that the poem originated. 
It is the idealized Nelson who stands before us in these 



Wordsworth's Patriotic and Political Poems 39 

But who, if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined 

Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 

Is happy as a Lover, and attired 

With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired : 

And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 

In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ; 

Or if an unexpected call succeed, 

Come when it will, is equal to the need. 

He who, though thus endued as with a sense 

And faculty for storm and turbulence. 

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans 

To homefelt pleasures, and to gentler scenes. 

This is the Happy Warrior, this is He 

That every man in arms should wish to be. 

When we read these words we are reminded of a passage 
in the "Recluse," in which Wordsworth tells us he could 
never read of two great war-ships grappling without a 
thrill of emulation more ardent than wise men should 
know. It is a passage which throws a new Hght upon the 
nature of Wordsworth. If he was serene, it was not 
because he was lethargic; if he urged the blessedness of 
regulated passions, it was not because his own heart was 
cold; he, too, had a passionate nature and heroic fiber in 
him, and that courageous and soldierly temper is fitly vin- 
dicated and expressed in the lofty spirit of his patriotic 
poems. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. Why has it been supposed that Wordsworth lost interest 
in political life? 

2. How did he set forth in his works the true spirit of 
democracy? 

3. What is true of his political views in the later years of 
his life? 



40 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

4. How was England affected by the fear of Napoleon? 

5. How do Wordsworth's writings of this period show the 
breadth of his patriotism? 

6. With what still higher purpose does he appeal to his 
own countrymen? 

7. Give illustrations of such expressions. 

8. What circumstances called forth the " Happy Warrior"? 

9. What light is thrown on Wordsworth's character by his 
allusion to the "two great war-ships grappling"? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ward's English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. W. Church, 
and Selections. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.) 

Aino7ig My Books. (Wordsworth.) James Russell Lowell. 

Frettch Revolution and the English Poets. A. E. Hancock. 



CHAPTER V 

WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTER- 
ISTICS 

When we put down the works of a poet, we are natu- 
rally inclined to ask what the poet himself was like in actual 
life, and to seek some authentic presentment of him as he 
moved among men. In the case of Wordsworth we have 
many partial portraits, but it can hardly be said that we 
have any true and finished picture. The seclusion of 
Wordsworth's life saved him from the scrutiny of that 
social world where every little trait of character is indel- 
ibly photographed on some retentive memory, and the 
trifles of unconsidered conversation are gathered up and 
often reproduced after many days in diaries and reminis- 
cences. Considering the literary force which Wordsworth 
was, few men have had such scanty dealings with the liter- 
ary circles of their time. If Wordsworth had died at fifty, 
it is pretty certain that beyond the reminiscences of per- 
sonal friends like Coleridge and Southey there would 
have been little to guide us to a true understanding of his 
person and character. Gradually, however, as the tide 
set in his favor, the quiet house at Rydal Mount became 
more and more a place of pilgrimage, and few visitors of 
eminence came away without noting down certain impres- 
sions, more or less instructive, of the great Lake Poet. 

First of all there come naturally the testimonies of 
those men of letters who formed a little colony beside the 

41 



42 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

English lakes, and whose names are inseparably associ- 
ated with Wordsworth's. Southey's sense of Words- 
worth's powers may be measured by his enthusiastic 
verdict, that there never was and never would be a greater 
poet. Coleridge conveys his impression of Wordsworth's 
strength of character, not less than of his genius, in the 
pathetic lines written in the days of his own eclipse and 
sorrow, and here quoted: 

O great Bard! 
Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air, 
With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir 
Of ever-enduring men. 
Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, 
The pulses of my being beat anew. 

The quality in Wordsworth which struck Coleridge most 
was naturally the quality in which he himself was most 
deficient — the robustness and sufficiency of the poet's 
nature. De Quincey, in his sketch, observes the same 
characteristic, and probably this was the first and deepest 
impression which Wordsworth created. He struck all 
who knew him as a solid, indomitable man, somewhat 
taciturn, save when the theme inspired him and the com- 
pany was fitting; a man who knew in what he had be- 
lieved, and knew how to stand true to himself and his 
convictions, amid evil report and good report. That there 
should be something of childlike vanity and harmless ego- 
tism about him was perhaps the natural consequence of 
his lack of humor and his secluded life. When Emerson 
visited him he was much amused to see Wordsworth 
solemnly prepare himself for action, and then declaim like 
a school-boy his latest sonnet on Fingal's Cave. If Words- 
worth had had any of the elements of humor in him, he 



Wordsworth's Personal Characteristics 43 

himself would have been too conscious of the ludicrous 
side of the proceeding to have indulged in it. But Words- 
worth united in himself philosophic seriousness and child- 
like simplicity, and was singularly insensible to humor. 
His neighbors said they never heard him laugh, and 
remarked that you could tell from his face there was no 
laughter in his poetry. He took life seriously, and, to 
quote Mrs. Browning's fine phrase, poetry was to him "as 
serious as life." He once told Sir George Beaumont that 
in his opinion "a man of letters, and indeed all public men 
of every pursuit, should be severely frugal." The Puritan 
disciphne which he appHed to his life molded his character, 
and a constant life of plain living and high thinking left 
little room for the casual graces of persiflage and banter. 
Of mere cleverness, the airy agility of shallow brains and 
ready tongues, he was destitute. He was not suave, not 
fascinating, scarcely prepossessing. But if he was calm 
it was not with any natural coldness of temperament; his 
calm was the fruit of long discipline and fortitude. One 
acute observer speaks of the fearful intensity of his feel- 
ings and affections, and says that if his intellect had been 
less strong they would have destroyed him long ago. De 
Quincey in like manner noted his look of premature age,* 
"the furrowed and rugged countenance, the brooding 
intensity of the eye, the bursts of anger at the report of 
evil doings" — the signs of the passionate forces which 
worked within him. He himself in his many self-revela- 
tions conveys the same impression of a nature hard to 
govern, of violent passions disciplined with difficulty, of 
wild and tumultuous desires conquered only by incessant 

* De Quincey says that when Wordsworth was thirty-nine his age was 
guessed at over sixty. 



44 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

vigilance. He bore upon himself the marks of a difficult 
life, and it was a touch of genuine insight which led Cole- 
ridge to describe him by the brief and pregnant phrase — 
an "ever-enduring man." 

The picture which Harriet Martineau gives of Words- 
worth as she knew him in his old age does not err on the 
side of adulation, but it cannot conceal the essential noble- 
ness of his character. Harriet Martineau thought little 
of his writings, and says so with caustic frankness. 
According to her view — the view be it remembered of an 
incessantly busy woman — Wordsworth suffered from hav- 
ing nothing to do; and he suffered yet more in his old age 
from the adulation of the crowd of visitors who poured 
toward Rydal Mount during the tourist season. To each 
of these idle visitors, and they averaged five hundred a 
season, Wordsworth behaved much in the same way. He 
politely showed them round his grounds, explained at what 
particular spot certain poems were written, and then 
politely bowed them out. He had no reticence either in 
reciting his poems or talking of them; indeed, he often 
spoke of them in an impersonal sort of way, as though 
they had no relation to himself, and he criticised them as 
freely as though some one else had written them. Thus 
he told Harriet Martineau that the "Happy Warrior" did 
not "best fulfill the conditions of poetry, but it was a 
chain of extremely valooable thoughts," a criticism which 
Miss Martineau indorses as "eminently just." In these, 
and in many similar proceedings, we recognize the naive 
simplicity of the man He solemnly advised Miss Marti- 
neau to give nothing but tea to her visitors, and if they 
wanted meat let them pay for it themselves, that having 
been his own method of proceeding in his early days of 



Wordsworth's Personal Characteristics 45 

penury at Grasmere. That this frugal suggestion did not 
spring from any inhospitable meanness is abundantly evi- 
dent from the larger generosities of Wordsworth's life. 
His treatment of poor Hartley Coleridge is above praise. 
Miss Martineau met Hartley only five times, and on each 
occasion he was drunk. Wordsworth treated him as an 
erring son, and when all hope of reclaiming him was over, 
paid for his lodgings, cared for his wants, and smoothed 
his passage to the grave. There are few more touching 
pictures than that of the old poet standing bareheaded by 
the grave of Hartley on the bleak winter morning when 
all that was mortal of that unhappy genius was laid to rest 
in the quiet God's-acre which was soon to receive the dust 
of Wordsworth. 

An equally beautiful picture is painted by Miss Marti- 
neau of the poet as she often met him, "attended perhaps 
by half a score of cottagers' children, the youngest pulling 
at his cloak or holding by his trousers, while he cut ash 
switches out of the hedge for them." This little touch of 
nature may be paired off with Mr. Rawnsley's story of 
how a pastor in a far-away parish was asked by a very 
refined, handsome-looking woman on her death-bed to read 
over to her and to her husband the poem of "The Pet 
Lamb," and how she had said at the end, "That was 
written about me; Mr. Wordsworth often spoke to me, 
and patted my head when a child," and had added with 
a sigh, "Eh, but he was such a dear kind old man!" 
Miss Martineau also strongly confirms the impression of 
Wordsworth's isolation from the main streams of life, the 
solitary self-containedness of his character, when she says 
that his life was "self-enclosed," and that he had scarcely 
any intercourse with other minds, in books or conversation. 



46 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Another source of information about Wordsworth is 
found in the reminiscences of him among the peasantry, 
which have been so excellently collated by Mr. Rawnsley. 
These have a unique value as the only record we possess 
of the impression which Wordsworth created, not on culti- 
vated minds, but on the minds of the simple dales-people 
whose virtues he so strenuously sang. The northern mind 
has two distinguishing qualities — a certain quickness of 
imagination which finds expression in the use of singularly 
vivid phrases, and a certain shrewd touch of humor which 
delights in exaggerative travesty. Making allowance for 
these conditions, we m.ay construct a remarkably lifelike 
portrait from these observations of Wordsworth's humble 
neighbors. We are face to face with Wordsworth in the 
prime of his power and force, when we are told he was 
"a plainish-faaced man, but a fine man leish [active], and 
almost always upon the road. He wasn't a man of many 
words, would walk by you times enuff wi'out sayin' owt, 
specially when he was in study. He was always a-study- 
ing, and you might see his lips a-goin' as he went along 
the road." Another speaks of him as "a vara practical- 
eyed man, a man as seemed to see aw that was stirrin'." 
He walked in later days with "a bit of a stoop," which 
somewhat diminished the sense of his real height, which 
was about six feet. When he was making a poem, "he 
would set his head a bit forward, and put his hands behint 
his back. And then he would start a-bumming, and it 
was bum, bum, bum, stop; and then he'd set down, and 
git a bit o' paper out, and write a bit. However, his lips 
were always goan' whoale time he was upon gress walk. 
He was a kind mon, there's no two words about that; if 
any one was sick i' the plaace, he wad be off to see til' 



Wordsworth's Personal Characteristics 47 

'em." His only recreations were walking and skating. 
He was first upon the ice, and 

Wheeled about 
Proud and exulting like an untired horse, 
That cares not for his home. 

He had very little care for personal appearance. He usu- 
ally wore a wide-awake and an old blue cloak. "Niver seed 
him in a boxer in my life," says one witness, with pathetic 
reproach. He had even been known to ride in a dung- 
cart upon his longer excursions: "Just a dung-cart, wi' a 
seat-board in front, and bit o' bracken in t' bottom, com- 
fortable as owt." He had a deep bass voice, and when 
he was "bumming" away in some remote part at nightfall, 
the casual passenger was almost terrified. He constituted 
himself by common consent general custodian of the 
beauties of the district, and prevented many a copse from 
being cut down and superintended the building of many 
a cottage. Not a companionable man, however — a 
remoteness about him which awed men rather than 
attracted them. Indeed, their one complaint about him 
was, that he had no convivial tendencies, like Hartley 
Coleridge, who came very much nearer the rustic ideal of 
a poet than the solitary of Rydal Mount. He was "a 
desolate-minded man; as for his habits, he had noan; 
niver knew him with a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his 
mouth." He "was not lovable in the faace, by noa 
means" — the face was too rugged and austere to be fasci- 
nating. So one rustic observer after another bears his 
witness, the net result being a sufficiently luminous picture 
of a strong and somewhat taciturn man, buried in his own 
thoughts, passing up and down among his fellows with a 



48 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

certain awe-inspiring unapproachableness, and yet a man 
of warm heart and quick sympathy; not a cheerful man, 
but a man who, after long battle, has won the secret of 
peace, and walks a solitary path, clothed with silence and 
winning from others the reverence due to the hermit and 
the sage. 

Stiff and awkward as Wordsworth often was in con- 
versation, yet there were times when he created a sincere 
admiration by his talk. Haydon says: "Never did any 
man so beguile the time as Wordsworth. His purity of 
heart, his kindness; his soundness of principle, his infor- 
mation, his knowledge, and the intense and eager feelings 
with which he pours forth all he knows affect, interest, 
and enchant one." But among all the various literary 
portraits which we possess of Wordsworth, there is none 
so subtle and so potent as Carlyle's. Carlyle thought little 
of Wordsworth's writings, but after he had met him he 
says: "He talked well in his way; with veracity, easy 
brevity, and force. His voice was good, frank, sonorous; 
though practically clear, distinct, forcible, rather than 
melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately confi- 
dent, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; 
a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, 
sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and 
did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn man, 
glad to unlock himself, to audience sympathetic and intelli- 
gent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of 
much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not 
bland or benevolent so much as close, impregnable, and 
hard; a man niulta iaccrc loqiiive paratus, in a world where 
he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode 
along. The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a 



Wordsworth's Personal Characteristics 49 

quiet clearness; there was enough of brow, and well 
shaped. He was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, 
tall, and strong-looking when he stood; a right good old 
steel-gray figure, with a fine rustic simplicity and dignity 
about him, and a veracious strength looking through him, 
which might have suited one of those old steel-gray Mark- 
grafs whom Henry the Fowler set up to ward the 
marches and do battle with the intrusive heathen in a 
stalwart and judicious manner. ' ' The last phrase recalls to 
us Wordsworth's confession in the "Prelude" to his early 
love of battle histories and thirst for a life of heroic 
action. A man who had not had something of the fighter 
in him could never have defied the world as he defied it. 
His imaginative faculty made him a poet; but under all 
his intellectual life there throbbed the difficult pulse of a 
valorous restlessness, and he had in him the pith and sinew 
of the hero. Poets have too often been the victims of 
their own sensitiveness, but Wordsworth stands among 
them as a man of stubborn strength, an altogether sturdy 
and unsubduable man. "Out of this sense of loneliness," 
a friend once wrote to Harriet Martineau, "shall grow 
your strength, as the oak, standing alone, grows and 
strengthens with the storm; whilst the ivy, clinging for 
protection to the old temple wall, has no power of self- 
support." Doubtless the loneliness of Wordsworth's life 
fed his strength, and no finer image than that of the oak 
could be found to describe the resolute vigor of Words- 
worth's character. He certainly was no weak spray of ivy 
clinging to a temple wall ; but he never forgot the temple 
and its sanctities notwithstanding; and if he was an oak, 
it was an oak that had its roots in sacred soil and cast the 
shadow of its branches on the doorways of the sanctuary. 



50 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. Why is the material relating to Wordsworth's personal 
life somewhat meager? 

2. How was he regarded by the different members of the 
Lake school of poets? 

3. What did his contemporaries say of his seriousness and 
intensity of character? 

4. What quaUties of Wordsworth are shown in his treat- 
ment of Hartley Coleridge? 

5. What incidents illustrate his kindly relations with chil- 
dren? 

6. How is his personality described by the peasantry among 
whom he lived? 

7. What pictures are given of him by Haydon and Carlyle? 

8. In what respects is the oak a fine image of Wordsworth's 
character? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

IVarcfs English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. W. Church, 
and Selections. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.) 

Literary Associations of the English Lakes. H. D. Rawnsley. 

Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. (Wordsworth, the poet 
and the man.) J. C. Shairp. 

Biographia Literaria. Coleridge. (Bohn Library.) 

Recollections of Coleridge and Wordsworth. De Quincey. 



CHAPTER VI 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH— CONCLUDING 
SURVEY 

It is evident to the reader who has followed this imper- 
fect study of Wordsworth with any degree of care that 
his merits and defects are alike great, and in concluding 
our survey it is well to recapitulate them. In few poets 
are the profound and trivial found in such close proximity, 
and this is his chief defect. Like Browning, for many 
years Wordsworth had few readers, and consequently 
wrote more for his own pleasure than with the artistic 
restraint and carefulness which the sense of public praise 
and criticism impose. Such criticism as he received was 
little better than insane or spiteful vituperation, and its 
only effect was to increase in a man of Wordsworth's 
temperament a stubborn dependence on himself. It is 
hard to say which acts with worse effect upon a poet, the 
adulation of an undiscerning or the apathy of an indiffer- 
ent public. It seems likely, however, that if Wordsworth 
had received any public encouragement early in life, it 
would have acted beneficially, in leading him to perceive 
his own faults of style, and perhaps to correct them. 
Tliere are various passages in Wordsworth's letters which 
prove that, while he braced himself to endure public hos- 
tility with uncomplaining stoicism, yet he would not the 
less have valued public encouragement. But as years 
wore away, and his circle of readers still continued to be 

.SI 



52 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

of the narrowest, he cared less and less to write with any 
definite attempt to gain the public ear. He wrote for his 
own delectation, and, as we have seen, often attached false 
values to his poems. He failed, as every solitary writer 
must fail, to discriminate between the perfect and imperfect 
work of his genius. The result is, that to-day the perfect 
work of Wordsworth is hampered by its association with 
the imperfect. His readers often fail to take a just meas- 
urement of the noble qualities of his genius, because it is 
so easy for them to pass from his greatest poems to pas- 
sages of verse-writing which are dull, trivial, bald, and in 
every way unworthy of him. This fact has been amply 
recognized by Matthew Arnold, and he has endeavored to 
remedy the defect by his admirable selection from the 
works of Wordsworth. Few poets bear the process of 
selection so well, and certainly none have so much to gain 
by it. 

There is something of pathos, indeed, in the recollec- 
tion of the relation which Wordsworth bore to the litera- 
ture of his day. He came in the wake of Byron, and 
uttered a note so different that it is scarcely surprising 
that the multitude who read Byron had no ear for Words- 
worth. For every thousand who bought "Childe Harold" 
there was perhaps one who bought the "Lyrical Ballads." 
When contempt and hostility had slowly passed into grate- 
ful recognition, his fame was menaced from another quarter. 
By that time Tennyson was making himself heard, and 
Tennyson soon passed Wordsworth in the race for fame. 
Wordsworth never knew the joy of unrivaled and indis- 
putable pre-eminence. His star rose unperceived in the 
firmament where Byron reigned in splendor, and before 
the fading afterglow of Byron had left a space for his 



William Wordsworth — Concluding Survey 53 

modest light to spread, it was again eclipsed by the grow- 
ing beams of Tennyson. The one poet had the vehement 
personality, and the other the rich and ornate style, which 
Wordsworth lacked. Each appealed to the popular ear 
as he did not; the one with a more masterful, the other 
with a more musical, note. It seemed part of the irony 
of fate that Wordsworth should nurture his heart in soli- 
tary endurance to the end, and should never know what it 
was to reap the full harvest of his toils. Perhaps also 
there is a law of compensation at work which has insured 
to Wordsworth a more solid fame than Byron seems likely 
to enjoy or Tennyson is likely to attain. The sureness 
which we usually associate with slowness has certainly 
marked the growth of Wordsworth's fame; and it maybe 
confidently said that at no period since the appearance of 
the "Lyrical Ballads" has Wordsworth been so widely 
read as now. Can as much be said of Byron .-' Will as 
much be said in a hundred years of Tennyson .'' Of Byron 
at least it is true that he has decreased while Wordsworth 
has increased. While the star of Byron has gradually 
receded, the star of Wordsworth has risen into dominance 
and burns with an enduring and immitigable flame. If 
the verdict of universal criticism goes for anything, it is 
clear that Wordsworth has come to stop. 

There are, of course, some dissentients to this judg- 
ment, but one hardly pays much attention nowadays to 
the erratic criticisms of Mr. Swinburne, and still less to 
Mr. Oscar Wilde when he writes contemptuously of "Mr. 
Wordsworth," or Mr. Andrew Lang when he is good 
enough to inform us that he does not care "very much for 
Mr. William Wordsworth." These are merely the small 
impertinences of criticism, meant to excite laughter, but 



54 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

likelier to inspire contempt, and in no case worthy of any 
serious resentment. Nor can one quarrel seriously with 
so genial a humorist as Edward Fitzgerald, when he is 
provoked by the almost irritating respectability of Words- 
worth to write of him as "my daddy." It is more to the 
purpose to recollect that Coleridge placed Wordsworth 
"nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, 
yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own." If this 
be regarded as the unconsidered praise of enthusiastic 
friendship, we have also to recollect that Matthew Arnold, 
who was always frugal in his praise, and never guilty of 
untempered adulation, has practically mdorsed this ver- 
dict. With Shakespeare and Milton he will not compare 
him, but next to these august names he ranks Wordsworth 
as the man who has contributed most to the permanent 
wealth of English poetry since the Elizabethan age. Nor 
does Mr. John Morley, the latest critic of Wordsworth, 
contest the justice of this criticism. He cannot grant him 
Shakespeare's vastness of compass, nor Milton's sublimity, 
nor Dante's "ardent force of vision"; but he admits 
Wordsworth's right to comparison, and admirably states 
Wordsworth's peculiar gift when he says: "What Words- 
worth does is to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify. Words- 
worth, at any rate, by his secret of bringing the infinite 
into common life, as he invokes it out of common life, has 
the skill to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to his 
influence, into inner moods of settled peace; to touch 'the 
depth and not the tumult of the soul'; to give us quiet- 
ness, strength, steadfastness, and purpose, whether to do 
or to endure." He would be a daring man who contested 
a verdict indorsed by the three most eminent names of 
modern criticism, and it is pretty safe to assume that on all 



William Wordsworth — Concluding Survey 55 

the main issues this verdict is decisive, and is not hkely to 
be seriously impugned. 

Any final survey ot Wordsw^orth's work w^ould be in- 
complete without mention of what may, after all, be taken 
as his noblest single poem, the "Ode on Intimations of 
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." 
This poem was written when Wordsworth was at the 
prime of his powers (1803-6), and is rich in his peculiar 
excellences. It also sums up much that is most charac- 
teristic in his philosophy. The starting-point of his 
philosophy is, that man has in himself all the elements of 
perfect life, if he will but learn how to adjust himself to 
the environment in which he finds himself: 

The Child is father of the Man, 

I could wish my days to be 

Bound each to each in natural piety. 

The evils of life spring from the perverse disregard of 
his true instincts, to which man is prone. The child loves 
nature, and is happiest in contact with nature, and it is for 
that reason Wordsworth urges the absolute need for com- 
munion with nature in the perfect human life. In the 
natural instincts of the child's heart we have, if we only 
knew it, the true indications of the highest possible devel- 
opment of human nature. They are the pointer stars by 
which we can measure the firmament of human life and 
ascertain the true bearings and infinite courses of human 
destiny. But behind this assumption another question 
lies. We ask, what is there to prove to us that these 
instincts are right, and whence do they spring? The 
answer to this question Wordsworth gives in this great 
ode. As usual, he probes the mystic depths of his own 



56 Literary Leaders of Modern Lngland 

experiences, and from that depth rescues the clue which 
interprets to him the whole mystery and circumference of 
human destiny. He tells us that as a child he had no 
notion of death, nor could he bring himself to realize it as 
a state applicable to his own being. He felt within him- 
self the movements of a spirit that knew nothing of decay 
or death. He even felt it difficult to realize the fact of 
an external world, so absorbed was he in the rapture 
of idealism. "Many times," he says, "while going to 
school, have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself 
from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time 
I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I 
have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation 
of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the re- 
membrances," as is expressed in the lines: 

Obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings, 
Blank misgivings of a Creature, 

Moving about in worlds not recognized, 
High instincts, before which our mortal nature 

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised. 

He recalls the "dream-like vividness and splendor which 
invests objects of sight in childhood," and then asks, 
what is the interpretation of this sense of wonder and 
strangeness which is the earliest recollection of childhood 
in the presence of external nature.' His reply is, that in 
the child's spiritual aloofness from the world, in his sense 
of the foreignness of life as he finds it, is the intimation of 
his previous existence in the purer realms of spirit, and 
of his ultimate return to a spiritual existence. He is a 
spirit clothed with fleshy apparel for a moment, but im- 



William Wordsworth — Concluding Survey 57 

mortal in himself, and moving through the darkened ways 
of mortality with the primal fire of immortality burning in 
his heart, and trembling upward to the source from which 
it sprang. The world is his prison-house, and the great 
end of life is not to be reconciled to the prison-house, but 
to retain and strengthen the divine desires which haunt 
him with the sense of something lost and something 
higher. Mere shadowy recollections they may be, and 
yet they are 

The fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake 

To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor Man nor Boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy 
Can utterly abolish or destroy! 

This poem is the noblest of all testimony to the profound 
religiousness of Wordsworth's spirit. It breathes some- 
thing more than the peace, it trembles with the rapture of 
the loftiest piety. It purges, it transforms, it exalts us. 
We catch a spiritual glow as we listen, we see before us 
the unfolding vision of glory beyond glory, such as he 
saw who stood on Patmos and beheld the heavens opened, 
and the infinite cycles of immeasurable divine purposes 
fulfilling themselves. Prisoners though we be, stifled in a 
world of sense, weighed upon with fetters of ignoble cus- 
tom, yet as we climb the solitary peak of contemplation 
where Wordsworth stands like a seer lost in vision^ — 



58 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us thither, 

Can in a moment travel hither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore. 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

And last, it may be noted that in literary finish and preg- 
nancy of phrase Wordsworth never surpassed this poem. 
It marks the complete culmination of his power. Phrase 
after phrase, such as, 

Faith that looks through death, 

In years that bring the philosophic mind ; 



or, 



or, 



Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 



To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 

has passed into the currency of literature unnoticed, by 
reason of soine unforgettable quality of thought or expres- 
sion which stamps itself upon the universal memory. 
Longer poems, full of passages of memorable insight or 
emotion, Wordsworth has written, but his great qualities 
find no nobler display than in this poem. Nowhere does 
he more nearly approach to "Milton's sublime and unflag- 
ging strength and Dante's severe, vivid, ardent force of 
vision." It is, in fact, one of the few great odes of Eng- 
lish literature, and is in itself sufficient to give Wordsworth 
rank among the few greatest poets who stand secure above 
the transience of human taste — 

The great of old. 
The dead but sceptered sov'reigns, who still rule 
Our spirits from their urns. 



William Wordsworth — Concluding Survey 59 

Finally, we note that Wordsworth is not the poet of 
youth, but of maturity. There is poetry, as there is art, 
which does not dazzle us with wealth of color, but which 
deals in cool and silvery grays, unnoticed by the taste 
which seeks startling and sensational effects, but infinitely 
refreshing to tired eyes which have long since turned from 
the sensational in resentment and something of disgust. 
Perhaps it is not until we have been surfeited with gaudy 
art that we learn fully to appreciate this very different art. 
Then is the time for the cool gray; then it is that these 
softer and soberer tones of color soothe the eye and satisfy 
the brain. It is, in the same way, precisely when the 
poets of our youth cease to allure us that the charm of 
Wordsworth begins to be most keenly felt. To the mature 
man, who has wearied of the theatrical glitter of Byron, 
or the cloying sweetness of Keats, Wordsworth comes like 
the presence of Nature herself. He does not captivate the 
taste with casual brilliance, but he subdues it with a sense 
of infinite tranquillity and refreshment. He satisfies the 
heart, he inspires and stimulates the thought. We read 
him not once, but many times, and as life advances we 
find that he is one of the few poets we need not cast aside. 
He ennobles and invigorates us. He advances with us as 
we pass into those shadows which lie about the doorways 
of mortality, and his voice never falters in its encourage- 
ment and pious hope. He becomes to us more than a 
poet — he is our guide, philosopher, and friend; and when 
many other guides of youth are shaken off, the mature 
mind grows more and more sympathetic to Wordsworth, 
and finds in him a spiritual comradeship such as no other 
poet has it in his power to give. 



6o Literary Leaders of Modern England 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What is the chief defect in Wordsworth's work as a 
whole, and to what circumstances is this due? 

2. How was his recognition hindered by his nearness to 
Byron and Tennyson? 

3. Give the estimation in which he is held by leading modern 
critics. 

4. What is his greatest poem, and what the starting-point 
of its philosophy? 

5. Give the thought underlying the poem. 

6. In what respects does this poem mark the culmination of 
Wordsworth's power? 

7. Why is Wordsworth the poet, not of youth, but of 
maturity? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ward's English Poets. Vol. IV. Essay by R. H. Church, 
and Selections. 

Essays in Criticism. Second Series. Matthew Arnold. 

Wordsworth. F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters 
Series.) 

Wordswortliiana. Papers read to the Wordsworth Society. 
Edited by Wm. Knight. 

Literary Studies. (Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning.) 
Walter Bagehot. 

Appreciatiofts. (Wordsworth.) Walter Pater. 



CHAPTER VII 

LORD TENNYSON— GENERAL CHARACTER- 
ISTICS 

Born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, August 5, 1809. "Poems by 
Two Brothers," published by J. Jackson, Louth, 1827. 
" Poems," chiefly lyrical, published 1830. " Poems," in two 
volumes (Moxon), 1842. The " Princess," 1847. " In Me- 
moriam," 1850. Became Poet Laureate in the same year. 
" Maud," 1855. The " Idylls of the King," 1859; completed 
1885. " Enoch Arden," 1864. Offered and accepted a 
Peerage, 1883. 

When we come to the name of Tennyson we do well 
to pause, for in his many-sidedness he represents more 
fully than any other poet of our day the complex thought 
and activities of the century in which his lot has been 
cast. Seldom has a poet's fame grown more slowly or 
securely, and never has a poet's career been crowned with 
a larger degree of worldly success. It is now more than 
half a century since his first slender volume of poems 
appeared. At that date Christopher North, otherwise 
Professor Wilson, and the Edinburgh reviewers were in 
the full heyday of their power, and exercised a dominance 
in criticism which it is difficult for us to understand to-day. 
A new poet in those days had to fear ridicule more than 
indifference, a position which may now be said to be 
entirely reversed. By turning to that section of the com- 
plete works of Tennyson headed Juvenilia, we can our- 
selves judge what was the character of the claim which 

61 



62 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

the young poet in 1830 made upon the pubHc attention. 
The volume is not merely slender in bulk, but equally 
slight in quality. The influence of Keats is apparent 
everywhere. There is a femininity of tone and a sensu- 
ousness of word-painting which are in the exact manner of 
Keats. The triviality of Keats's worst style is as appar- 
ent as the magic phrasing of his best. Take, for instance, 
this stanza from "Claribel" — 

The slumbrous wave outdwelleth, 

The babbling runnel crispeth, 

The hollow grot replieth, 

Where Claribel low-lieth. 

This is weak with the peculiar weakness of Keats; the 
straining after effect by the use of uncommon and affected 
forms of speech. Nor do the other poems in the little 
volume rise to anything like a high average. 

There are, however, splendid indications of true and 
genuine power amid much that is weak and imitative. 
"Mariana" is a piece of powerful painting, done with 
excellent artistic taste, intention, and finish. Finer still 
is the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." It is rich, 
almost too rich indeed, in its coloring, but no one can fail 
to feel the charm of words in such lines as these: 

At night my shallop rustHng thro' 

The low and blooming foliage, drove 

The fragrant glistening deeps, and clove 
The citron-shadows in the blue: 
By garden-porches on the brim, 

The costly doors flung open wide, 
Gold glittering hrough lamplight dim. 

And broidered sofas on each side; 
In sooth it was a goodly time, 
For it was in the golden prime 

Of good Haroun Alraschid. 



Lord Tennyson — General Characteristics 6^ 

But in fineness of workmanship and depth of feehng the 
"Deserted House," the "Dying Swan," and "Oriana, " 
take an easy precedence. In the second of these poems 
there is that which goes farther to insure a poet the atten- 
tion of the pubhc than anything else — there is distinctive- 
ness and originahty. The "Dying Swan" was sufficient 
at once to stamp Tennyson as an original poet. In its 
perfectly accurate depiction of nature it may remind us 
somewhat of Wordsworth, but it is a mere suggestion, 
and the style is wholly different. Wordsworth's has been 
described as the pure style in poetry; Tennyson's as the 
ornate. The bond of likeness is in the fidelity of each 
poet to the actual facts of nature. Wordsworth never 
drew a picture of mountain solitude or lake scenery more 
simply true to fact than the picture this young Lincoln- 
shire poet gives of the great open spaces of the fen coun- 
try, with their breadth of sky and far-stretching solitude, 
which is almost desolation, and their gleaming water- 
courses fretting everywhere, like silver threads, the waste 

of green. 

The plain was grassy, wild, and bare, 
Wide, wild, and open to the air. 
Which had built up everywhere 
An under-roof of doleful gray. 

Ever the weary wind went on, 
And took the reed-tops as it went. 

One willow o'er the river wepl 
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh; 

Above in the wind was the swallow, 
Chasing itself at its own wild will. 
And far thro' the marish green, and still 

The tangled watercourses slept. 
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow. 



64 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

The sense of desolation is complete. It is not con- 
veyed to the mind by a single vivid touch, in the manner 
of Wordsworth, but by a series of cumulative effects, 
which are equally striking. It is not wonderful that a 
poem like this should arrest the attention of a mind like 
Christopher North's. The first volume of a poet has 
rarely contained anything so full of conscious strength, 
and so complete in its mastery of the art of poetry, as this 
pathetic picture of the dying swan. 

Christopher North — "rusty, crusty Christopher" as 
Tennyson afterward called him — was perhaps more con- 
scious of the weakness of the young poet than of his 
strength. In 1832, when the famous "Blackwood" 
criticism appeared, Wordsworth was still a rock of offense 
to the critics, and gibes and insult had not yet ceased to 
follow him to his solitude at Grasmere. Seven years were 
to elapse before Oxford was to recognize his greatness, 
eleven years before the laureateship was his. It was an 
unpropitious hour for poets. There had come a great 
ebb-tide in poetry, perhaps a natural result of that extraor- 
dinary outburst of lyric splendor with which the names 
of Shelley and Keats are associated. Robert Southey was 
laureate, and an age which had enthroned Southey as 
laureate might well turn a deaf ear to the voice of Tenny- 
son. Upon the whole it is greatly to the credit of Profes- 
sor Wilson that he had discrimination enough to see 
anything at all in the humble volume of poems by Alfred 
Tennyson, which was sent him for review; and he took 
occasion to give the young poet some excellent advice, for 
which he had the humility and discernment to be thankful. 

The cardinal error of these early poems Professor Wil- 
son was keen enousrh to discern at once. It was what he 



Lord Tennyson — General Characteristics 65 

called "puerility." There was a sort of unwholesome 
sadness about them, a distasteful melancholy, a mawkish- 
ness of tone and subject. It may be added, that the note 
of restrained and tender melancholy has always been one 
of the chief features of Tennyson's poetry. It is not 
obtrusive, but it is pervasive; it is rarely bitter or synical, 
but it is always there. It is apparent in the choice of 
subject, even in these early poems. Death and change 
strike the keynote of the volume. Mariana "in the 
moated grange" cries — 

I am aweary, aweary, 
Would God that I were dead! 

One of the sweetest of the songs is — 
Of the mouldering flowers; 

The air is damp, and hushed, and close, 
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose 
An hour before death. 

The fine ballad of "Oriana" is a ballad of death, and 
the "Dying Swan," although it rises into a voice of noble 
music in its close, is nevertheless a poem of desolation and 
sorrow. And over and above all this, a large part of the 
volume, no fewer than five poems indeed, are devoted to 
the depiction of various types of womanhood. Sweetness 
there is in the volume, but not strength; and the sweet- 
ness is cloying rather than piercing. It is not the voice 
of the strong and hopeful man, but of the poet touched 
with an incurable melancholy of thought and outlook. 
Yet if melancholy strikes the keynote of the whole, it is 
not less true that the melody is really new and striking. 
The first poem bears the under-title of "A Melody," and 



66 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

in the word Tennyson shows an exact appreciation of his 
own powers. Melodious he always is. No poet has ever 
had a profounder knowledge of the laws of metrical music. 
It is the melody of his phrase that carries it home to the 
memory, not less than its felicity. Any student of Tenny- 
son can recall at will scores of lines which cling to the 
memory by the charm of their own exquisite music. 

Take such examples as these — 

From "Tithonus": 

While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. 

From "Ulysses": 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers 
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

From the "Princess": 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, 
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
And murmuring of innumerable bees. 

In these last lines there is an overpowering imaginative 
charm, something almost magical in its bewitchment, 
which makes us think of the words of Keats, that to him 
a fine phrase was an intoxicating delight. It is melody, 
the finest and most magical melody of which words are 
capable. There is nothing in the early poems of Tenny- 
son to match such exquisite phrasing as this, but there are 
nevertheless sure indications of where the real power of 
the poet lay. It was the advent of an intensely artistic 
mind, palpitatingly alive to the vision and power of 
beauty, touched with the artist's ecstasy, and with the 
artist's corresponding melancholy, keen, subtle, delicately 
poised, possessing the secret of loveliness rather than of 



Lord Tennyson — General Characteristics 67 

rude vigor; it was the advent of such a mind into the 
world of Enghsh poetry which was signahzed by that 
slender volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson, published 
in 1830. 

But bright as were the indications of poetic genius in 
the earliest work of Tennyson, few could have dared to 
augur from them the height of excellence to which the 
poet has now attained. A yet severer critic than Wilson 
was Lockhart, who reviewed the 1833 poems in the Quar- 
terly Review of that year, and it is noticeable that almost 
every suggestion of Lockhart was thereafter adopted by 
Tennyson. He had the sense to take the advice of his 
critics, to rid himself of puerilities, to be patient, to dare 
to investigate and grapple with his own faults, to enter 
upon a course of arduous labor and invincible watchful- 
ness, to practice not merely the earnest culture of art, but 
also to seek the self-restraint of art; and he has fully justi- 
fied their presage that he had in him the making of a great 
poet. Poetry has not been to him a pastime, but the 
supreme passion and toil of life. Again and again he has 
polished and remolded his earlier poems, not always, per- 
haps, to their advantage, but always with the intent of 
making them more perfect in metrical harmony, and more 
complete and concise in poetic workmanship. The melody 
has grown with the years; it has become more subtle, 
more penetrating, more magical. He has carried the art 
of metrical construction to a height of perfection never 
before attempted in English poetry. It is difficult to find 
a false rhyme, a slovenly stanza, or a halting meter in all 
the great bulk of his completed works. As an example 
of the infinite laboriousness of true poetic art there can 
be no finer example. And in variety of subject he has 



68 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

but one rival. He has treated the romantic, the antique, 
the domestic hfe of the world with equal skill. History 
and theology, art and science, legendary lore, and modern 
social problems find constant reflection and presentment 
in his poetry. Some of his poems are so clearly hewn 
that they are like mighty fragments of the antique; some 
treat of English peasant life; some of fairy-lore; some of 
religious fancy; some of social dreams and yearnings; in 
some the theme is slight, but the slightness of the theme 
is forgotten in the excellence of the workmanship; in 
some the theme is as solemn as life and death, and touches 
issues which are as old as human thought. "Rapt nuns," 
it has been said, "English ladies, peasant girls, artists, 
lawyers, farmers — in short, a tolerably complete repre- 
sentation of the miscellaneous public of the present day," 
jostle one another in his picture galleries. True, the 
cosmopolitan note of Browning is wanting; but if Tenny- 
son has not the catholic sympatliies of Browning, he has 
succeeded in touching with the utmost felicity many 
aspects of English life which his great rival has ignored. 
And his mood and style are as various as his themes. In 
such poems as "Dora" we have a Wordsworthian sim- 
plicity of diction, a coolness and purity ,of coloring almost 
cold in its severity. In such poems as "Maud" and 
"Locksley Hall" we have the utmost elaboration of ornate 
imagery and effect. He can be severely simple and 
chastely sensuous, classic and grotesque, subtle and pas- 
sionate, passing with the ease of perfect mastery from 
love to dialectics, from the wail of a somber pessimism to 
the exaltation and rapture of the triumphant lover. He 
can even be humorous, and excellently humorous, too, as 
in such a poem as the "Northern Farmer." It is prob- 



Lord Tennyson — General Characteristics 69 

ably in this diversity of gifts that the great secret of 
Tennyson's wide popularity is to be found. He touches 
many classes of readers, many varieties of mind. Of his 
limitations, his peculiarities of view and outlook, his atti- 
tude to religion and politics, his pervading melancholy and 
the causes of it, we shall see more as we devote more 
particular attention to his works; but enough has been 
said to explain why it is that he has won not merely wide 
but sound popularity; and not merely popularity, but fame 
and success such as no other English poet has ever enjoyed 
in the brief period during which his work was actually 
being done, and when the fruits of success were keenest 
to the taste and most alluring to the ambition. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What kind of criticism and from what sources did the 
writers of Tennyson's time have to meet? 

2. How is the influence of Keats shown in Tennyson's 
earliest work? 

3. What indications of Tennyson's ability are shown in his 
early poems? 

4. Illustrate this by the " Dying Swan." 

5. Why was Tennyson's youth "an unpropitious hour for 
poets"? 

6. What was the chief error of his earlier poems? 

7. How did these poems indicate the direction in which lay 
his real power? 

8. How did Tennyson profit by the advice of his critics? 

9. What is the probable reason for Tennyson's wide 
popularity? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alfred Lord Tennyson. By His Son. 2 Volumes. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry \'an Dyke. 

Tennyson, His Art aftd Relation to Modern Life. Stopford 
A. Brooke. 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning. Anne Thack- 
eray liitchie. 

The Victorian Poets. Edmund Clarence Stedman. 



CHAPTER VIII 

TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE 

The variety of Tennyson's work makes the task of 
arranging it more than usually difficult. Certain portions 
of his work are directly philosophical, and are meant to 
be elucidations or solutions of some of the deepest prob- 
lems of humanity. Others are surcharged with mournful- 
ness, and might be called lamentations; dirges over dead 
hopes, lost glories of chivalry, or the bitter presage of 
future trouble traveling towards us in the development of 
social perils. Others are purely fanciful, lyrics finished 
with airy grace, or poems breathing the enchantment of 
fairy-lore. But such a classification as this is incomplete 
and fails to yield the result which a just criticism desires. 
Broadly speaking, there are certain great subjects on 
which all true poets have something to say. These sub- 
jects are nature, woman, life, politics, and religion. 
Nature needs no definition; under the head of woman we 
must include all that pertains to love and chivalry; under 
the head of life, the general view of human action and 
society which distinguishes a poet; under politics, the 
poet's view of progress and the future of the race; under 
religion, what the poet has to say about the devout long- 
ings of humanity, its sorrows and their solution, the future 
and its promises. It will be found that under this classifi- 
cation the works of all great poets can be readily placed. 
It is the view of nature which is the distinguishing feature 

70 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 71 

in Wordsworth; it is the view of woman — gross, carnal, 
callous — which is the damning feature in Byron; it is the 
view of religion which lends such paramount interest to 
the poetry of Arnold and Browning. Let us begin, then, 
by examining what Tennyson has to say about Nature. 

We have already seen that to Shelley Nature was some- 
thing more than an abstract phrase: she was something 
alive, a radiant and potent spirit, a glorious power filling 
the mind with infinite delight, and drawing out the spirit 
of man in ecstatic communion. The first thing we note 
about Tennyson is, that Nature is not to him what she was 
to either Shelley or Wordsworth. He nowhere regards 
Nature as a living presence. He at no time listens for her 
voice as for the voice of God. To Shelley Nature was 
love; to Wordsworth she was thought; to Tennyson she 
is neither. He does not habitually regard Nature as 
the vesture of the Highest — the outward adumbration of 
the invisible God. He does not even regard her with the 
purely sensuous delight of Keats. And the reason for 
this lies in the fact that the sympathies of Tennyson are 
so various that there is no excess in any ; it is the full play 
of an exquisitely balanced mind that we see, rather than 
the fine ecstasy of an enthusiastic artist. To Wordsworth 
Nature was everything, and on the solitary hills he wor- 
shiped before her altars, and in the voice of the winds 
and waters he heard her breathings and caught the mes- 
sage of her wisdom. Apart from men, in solemn loneli- 
ness, incurious about the crowded life of cities or the 
vast movements of the troubled sea of human thought, he 
stood, silent and entranced, waiting for revelations of that 
Eternal Power whose splendor glowed upon the hills at 
dawn, and whose mind uttered itself out of the starry 



72 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

spaces of the wind-swept heavens at night. But Tenny- 
son has never professed himself incurious about the 
progress of human opinion or indifferent to the hfe of cities. 
Wordsworth's was the priestly temperament, Tennyson's 
is the artistic. The great drama of human life has not 
been permitted to pass him unnoticed. He has found joy 
in the refinements of wealth, interest in the progress of 
society, passionate absorption in the theological contro- 
versies of his time. A certain dramatic interest has always 
drawn him toward the tragic realities of past history and 
of present life. He has the quick eye of the scientific 
observer or of the artistic draughtsman, but little of the 
rapt contemplation of the seer. Thus it follows that, 
while Nature perpetually colors his writings, he has noth- 
ing new to say about her. 

There is, however, one quality which distinguishes his 
view of nature from that of other poets, viz., the scien- 
tific accuracy of his observation. Nature to him is neither 
love nor thought: she is law. He is full of the modern 
scientific spirit. He sees everywhere the movement of 
law and the fulfillment of vast purposes which are part of 
a universal order. He is under no delusion as to the 
meaning of Nature; so far from being love, she is "red in 
tooth and claw with rapine." The conclusions of modern 
science Tennyson has accepted with unquestioning faith, 
and the only factor which preserves him from an unpoeti- 
cal view of nature is the religious faith which makes him 
perceive nature, not as a mechanical engine of fate, but as 
a process of law leading to nobler life and larger being. 
That is the mission of law: not to slay, but to make alive; 
not to fulfill a blind course, but to work out a divine pur- 
pose and a diviner life for man, in those far-distant cycles 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 73 

which eye hath not seen, nor hath it entered into the heart 
of man to conceive. 

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men; 

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm; 

Then springs the crowning race of human kind. 

In other words, Tennyson sees Nature with the eye of 
the evolutionist, and traces through all her processes the 
fulfillment of a divine wisdom which means well toward 
man and all that it has made — 

One God, one law, one element, 

And one far-off Divine event 

To which the whole creation moves. 

On the other hand, because Tennyson says little that is 
new about Nature, it must not be assumed that he does 
not love her. On the contrary, he has studied her with 
unwearied fidelity, for which his knowledge of science has 
probably given him sharpened instinct and patience. It 
would be a curiously interesting study to mark the wide 
difference between even Shelley's broad generalizations of 
nature, accurate as they are, and the minute patience 
which Tennyson has devoted to every little touch of depic- 
tion in which clouds, or birds, or woods are represented 
to us. Tennyson's mind is not merely exquisitely sensi- 
tive to natural beauty, but it is deeply tinged with the 
characteristics of that scenery in which his early manhood 
was passed. The gray hillside, the "ridged wolds," the 
wattled sheepfold, the long plain, the misty mornings on 
the fens, the russet coloring of autumn — -this is scenery 
such as England abounds in, and is especially characteris- 
tic of Lincolnshire. Even more distinctly drawn from the 
fen scenery are such lines as these: 



74 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

And the creeping mosses, and clambering weeds, 
And the willow branches, hoar and dank, 
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, 
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng 
The desolate creeks and pools among 
Were flooded over with eddying song. 

In this single poem of the "Dying Swan," as we have 
seen, there is an extraordinary accumulation of effects, 
drawn from the sadness of nature, and used with perfect 
skill to enhance the pathos of the picture; and the sough- 
ing of the wind in the Lincolnshire reeds is to be heard in 
many another poem with equal sadness and distinctness. 

It is not without interest to remark that so great a poet 
as Tennyson is educated, not amid the wonderful dawns 
and cloud scenery of the Lake district, but under the 
"doleful under-roof of gray" built up everywhere above a 
flat country, where no doubt the tourist — if such, indeed, 
ever ventures into such solemn solitudes — would aver that 
there is nothing picturesque or striking. For a poet who 
was to express the sadness and satiety of the nineteenth 
century, however, it may be doubted if a more appropriate 
cradle-land could be discovered. 

No doubt it is in part to these natural influences which 
surrounded his boyhood that the extraordinary fidelity of 
Tennyson's descriptions of nature is to be attributed. 
Where there was little to describe it was natural that the 
power of observation should be trained to minute accuracy. 
Miss Thackeray tells us that he once asked her to notice 
whether the skylark did not come down sideways on the 
wing. This is extremely characteristic of Tennyson's 
habit in the observation of nature. He never coins a false 
phrase about the humblest flower that blows, for the sake 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 75 

of the felicity of the phrase and at the expense of the tints 
of the flower. He tells us precisely what he has seen. If 
he tells us that in the spring "a fuller crimson comes upon 
the robin's breast," and a "livelier iris changes on the 
burnished dove, ' ' we may be quite sure that he has watched 
the robin and the dove, and written with his eyes on them 
rather than on the paper. The sidelong descent of the 
lark is a thing to be noted, that when he comes to speak 
of it he may use a phrase that even the scientific naturalist 
would approve. The consequence of this fidelity to 
nature is, that Tennyson is constantly startling us with the 
vivid accuracy of his descriptions. We say again and 
again, "That is so; I have seen it," and the picture is 
ineffaceably stamped upon the memory. Sometimes it is 
done with a single phrase, or even a concentrated word. 
The writer will not soon forget how throughout one autumn 
he was haunted by the phrase — 

All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom. 

Again and again, as he climbed the Dorsetshire hills, the 
line met him at the summit: for there lay the death-dumb 
land, the long plain with its dim wisps of fog already 
beginning to rise, without voice or sound; the stillness of 
the dying season like the silence of a death-chamber; and 
just perceptible in the near hedgerow the constant drip of 
the dew, like the falling of unavailing tears. Let any one 
choose a very quiet, gray day in late autumn, when there 
has been a previous night of fog, and stand in a solitary 
place and listen, as the night begins to fill the land, and 
he will feel how exquisite is the truth of the description of 
Arthur coming home and climbing slowly to his castle — 

All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom. 



76 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

The same vivid pictorial power is illustrated in many 
other passages which will readily occur to the Tennysonian 
student. How admirable a touch of depiction is this: it 
is the hour of sunset on the marshes, when 

The lone hern forgets his melancholy, 

Lets down his other leg, and, stretching, dreams 

Of goodly supper in the distant pools. 

"A full sea, glazed with muffled moonlight," is the per- 
fect vignette of what he once saw at Torquay; a waterfall 
"slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn," a sketch taken on 
the Pyrenees; "a great black cloud draw inward from the 
deep," an etching made upon the top of Snowdon. From 
boyhood he loved the sea and studied it in all its moods, 
with the result that his sea-pictures are always exquisitely 
truthful. In those hours of "wise passiveness" he 

marked 

The curled white of the coming wave 
Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks, 

and how 

The wild wave in the wide north-sea, 
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears with all 
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies 
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark 
And him that helms it. 

It would be difiticult for words to attain to higher pictorial 
art than this: these two verses are two perfect pictures of 
the summer and the winter sea. 

The main point to observe, therefore, about Tennyson 
is, that in him we have the scientific observer and the 
artist rather than the interpreter of nature. Wordsworth 
interprets; Tennyson describes. He is vivid, pictorial. 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 77 

picturesque; but he has no fresh insight into the soul of 
things, save such as his science furnishes him. But if he 
has no new gospel to preach us from the book of nature, 
we may at least rejoice in the oerfect finish and enchant- 
ment of his pictures. 

To this it may be added that these pictures are for the 
most part essentially English in tone, atmosphere, and 
subject. Now and again, but with great rareness, he has 
depicted foreign scenery, as in the "Daisy" — 

How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair, 
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there, 
A thousand shadowy penciled valleys 
And snowy dells in a golden air. 

And the picture is perfect both in glamour and fidelity. 
But it is in English pictures he excels. Who that has 
seen the land of Kent does not recognize this.'' — 

The happy valleys, half in light, and half 
Far shadowing from the west, a land of peace; 
Gray halls alone among their massive groves; 
Trim hamlets;, here and there a rustic tower 
Half lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat; 
The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas; 
A red sail or a white; and far beyond, 
Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France. 

Or who does not feel the truth of this touch of rural life 
in England? — 

The golden autumn woodland reels 
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. 

Nor is it only such peaceful scenes as these that Tennyson 
can invest with the magic of his art; he knows how to 
grasp the larger effects of nature, the mountain gloom, the 



78 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

cloud grandeur, the dawn of day or night of tempest, and 
touch them off with an imaginative skill and power of 
phrase which stamp them indelibly on the memory. For 
let him who has watched the pageant of the dying day say 
if any human art could more grandly fix in words the 
western cloud effects than this — 

Yonder cloud, 
That rises upward, always higher 

And topples round the dreary west, 
A looming bastion fringed with fire. 

Or let him who has studied the warfare of wind and cloud 
and the wild upheaval and terror of gathering tempest say 
if this is not a picture such as Turner would have delighted 
to paint, and only he could have painted in all its stern 
magnificence — 

The forest cracked, the waters curl'd, 

The cattle huddled on the lea ; 

And wildly dashed on tower and tree 
The sunbeam strikes along the world. 

Nor could any angry morning after tempest be better 
painted than in this one pregnant line — 

All in a fiery dawning, wild with wind. 

Nor could the savage splendor of Alpine fastnesses, where 
precipice and glacier rise tier above tier, in shattered 
beauty and unvanquishable strength, be better brought 
home to the imagination than in this touch of solemn 

imagery — 

The monstrous ledges slope, and spill 
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke 
That like a ruined purpose waste in air. 

Nor has the breaking up of a stormy sky, when the clouds 
suddenly lift as though withdrawn upon invisible pulleys, 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 79 

and there is light at eventide, ever been represented better 
than in one of the earliest of all these poems, the immature 
and unequal "Eleanore"— 

As thunder-clouds, that hung on high, 
Roof'd the world with doubt and fear, 
Floating thro' an evening atmosphere. 

Grow golden all about the sky. 

And for imaginative intensity, such as the great Greek 
poets would have delighted in, and indeed wholly in their 
manner, it is hard to excel the phrase in which Tithonus 
describes the glory of the dawn — 

And the wild team 
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise 
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes. 
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. 

Or the farewell of Ulysses, when he cries: 

Come, my friends, 
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world, 
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars until I die. 

These are but random samples of the perfection to 
which Tennyson has wrought his art in the faithful and 
accurate depiction of nature. Every word tells: it tells 
because it is true, because it expresses the very spirit of 
the scene that he would paint, not less than its external 
show. The labor and culture which lie behind such per- 
fect phrases as these are immense. Not infrequently the 
source of some fine image is to be found in some remote 
page of the older poets; and part of the charm of the 
Tennysonian phrase is, that it is often reminiscent — a sub- 



8o Literary Leaders of Modern England 

tie echo, as it were, of a more ancient music, wliicli does not 
offend, but fascinates. Thus the image of the "ploughed 
sea" is one of the very oldest since the dawn of language, 
and the picture of the dawn in "Tithonus" has its counter- 
part in Marston's noble lines — 

But see, the dapple-gray coursers of the morn 
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs, 
And chase it through the sky.* 

But the more enduring element of beauty in such lines is 
their delightful truthfulness. "The sounding furrows" is 
an exact representation to ear and eye of what happens 
when the heaving waters are suddenly smitten with the 
level sweep of oars. The darkness trampled into flakes of 
fire is the precise effect of the instantaneous irruption of 
the splendor of the dawn, when the thin clouds that lie 
across the east are broken up into floating fragments, and 
hang quivering, like golden flames, in the lucid air, when 
the world lies still and windless, waiting for the day. 
"The fiery dawn," the great burst of streaming yellow, 
not graduated into crimson or purple, but all vast and 
lurid, like an angry conflagration in the east, is a spectacle 
which the seaman knows too well, when the night has been 
"wild with wind," and the storm pauses at the dawn, only 
to gather strength for the riotous havoc of the day. It is 
the exact truth of nature which is fixed in phrases like 
these. It is the truth Turner painted, the vision of the 
miracle of nature which he strove with infinite toil and true 
inspiration to retain in his immortal canvases. And 
because it is true art, therefore it is fine art. Much that 
might be said of nature, Tennyson has not said; to much 

* Vide Lamb's " Specimens of Elizabethan Poetry." 



Tennyson's Treatment of Nature 8i 

that others have said he is indifferent. But this at least 
he has done: he has approached nature, not with the hot 
and hasty zeal of the impressionist, but with the cool eye 
of the consummate artist; and every sketch of nature 
which he has given us, whether of the commonplace or 
the extraordinary, is finished with admirable skill, and has 
the crowning merit of absolute fidelity, accuracy, and 
truth. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What great subjects are discussed by all the eminent 
poets ? 

2. Illustrate this in the case of several English poets. 

3. How is the view of nature as held by Shelley and Words- 
worth different from that of Tennyson ? 

4. How did Tennyson's life in the fen country influence his 
study of nature ? 

5. Show how exquisitely truthful are his descriptions of 
the sea. 

6. What is true of his descriptions of English scenery ? 

7. Give other examples of his skill in portraying nature. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alfred Tennyson : His Life and Works. W. E. Wace, 
Alfred Tennyson. Andrew Lang. 

Tennyson : His A rt a7id Relation to Modern Life. Stopford 
A. Brooke. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry \^an Dyke. 



CHAPTER IX 

TENNYSON— LOVE AND WOMAN 

Just as one of the most crucial points about a poet is 
his treatment of nature, so again his view of womanhood 
affords a key to the character of his mind and the quality 
of his genius. The love poetry of the world is one of its 
most fascinating inheritances and ranges through many 
keys. Love has always furnished the impulse to poetry 
and has often been its staple. It would be difficult to find 
any poet who has nothing to say of love; it would be easy 
to find many poets who have never written exquisitely till 
they became lovers. The new divine warmth of the heart 
has liberated the faculties of the intellect and has given 
inspiration and insight to the soul. Even when the warmth 
has been sensuous rather than divine, it has not the less 
had some effect in the liberation of the mind. Burns dis- 
plays his highest genius in his love lyrics. Some of the 
Elizabethan poets are famous only by a single stanza, or 
a single poem, which expresses the passion of the human 
heart with such felicity, such delicate skill, such fire and 
tenderness, that the world cannot forget their phrases. 
Rossetti lives in the vision of womanhood, with every 
sense perpetually tingling to the keen delight of passion. 
Even Wordsworth kindles at the vision of love: he sees 
the ideal woman glowing before him, not with any heat of 
passion indeed, but with a calm and spiritual radiance, 
which is to him as a sacred flame, searching the spirit and 

82 



Tennyson — Love and Woman S^ 

purifying the heart. Perhaps the poet of our day least 
affected by the enchantment of love is Matthew Arnold. 
He is too reticent for passion, is too sadly philosophical to 
sing the rapture of the lover. But even Arnold has writ- 
ten love verses — not inspired lyrics like Burns 's, but never- 
theless, verses which have sprung from a lover's yearning. 
Tennyson is so far from an exception, that love forms the 
great motive in all his larger poems. Everywhere he 
testifies to the pre-eminence and influence of woman. He 
has been an ardent student of womanhood, and has struck 
out with admirable skill and genuine artistic feeling many 
typical portraits of womanhood. He has mastered the 
difificult secret of how to write voluptuously and yet retain 
the bloom of a delicate and almost virginal purity. He 
knows how to be passionate, but his passion never passes 
into that sensuous extravagance which is the sign of weak- 
ness. There is always a gravity and earnestness about it 
which preserves him from an excess which becomes ridicu- 
lous. In this he stands nearer to Wordsworth than to 
either Keats or Burns. But whereas in Wordsworth 
woman has no commanding position, and is almost for- 
gotten and obliterated in the presence of nature, in 
Tennyson woman is always pre-eminent, and the fas- 
cination of woman is at least as strong as the charm of 
nature. 

And here again we cannot help tracing the treatment 
of woman in Tennyson's poetry to the early influences 
which surrounded his boyhood. He was never cast upon 
the world, to sink or swim as he could, in the great seeth- 
ing whirlpools of sensual temptation. He carried with 
him no evil heritage of passionate blood, as did Byron; he 
was not brought face to face with any daring theories of 



84 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

free love, as was Shelley; he was not dependent on the 
coarse orgies of village society for recreation, as was 
Burns. He breathed an atmosphere of refinement from 
the very first. He was trained by every sight and influ- 
ence of early life into that fastidious purity which charac- 
terizes him. He grew into vigor in what might be called 
the cloistral calm of clerical life in a remote English vil- 
lage. The baser side of human life was not seen; the 
carnal meanings of love never so much as named; the 
coarser aspects of passion were smothered in flowers and 
fragrances. Behind all the love lyrics of Tennyson one 
sees the picture of a calmly ordered home, where domestic 
love moves like a shining presence, with hands busy in 
silent ministrations and heart full of the tenderness of a 
pure devotion. The portrait of Tennyson's mother is the 
key to his reverence for womanhood. It is a beautiful 
and tender face, delicately molded, lighted with a spiritual 
radiance of sympathy and hope, and yet, too, bearing 
pathetic traces of resigned sadness and sorrowful experi- 
ence. We can understand how Tennyson was preserved 
from the fatality of recklessness, how it is he has worn 
the white flower of a blameless life, and has ruled himself 
with chivalrous regard for womanhood, when we study his 
mother's face. What such a woman must have been in 
the home, and what sort of home it must have been 
where she moved like a ministering spirit, we can readily 
imagine. And how divinely pure and penetrating may 
be the influence of such a woman Tennyson has told 
us in a passage of the "Princess," which might without 
much risk of misinterpretation be taken as a personal 
reminiscence — 



Tennyson — Love and Woman 85 

I loved her: one 
Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt 
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise, 
Who looked all native to her place, and yet 
On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere 
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce 
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved, 
And girdled her with music. Happy he 
With such a mother! faith in womankind 
Beats in his blood, and trust in all things high 
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall 
He shall not blind his soul with clay. 

The first point to be noted, therefore, in Tennyson's treat- 
ment of love is its conspicuous purity. It is the love of 
the chivalrous knight, not of the Bohemian profligate, 
which he paints. His w^hole conception of love is rever- 
ential. It is a spiritual passion, not an earthly. He per- 
ceives it in its spiritual working, and not in its fleshly. 
With rare exceptions he shuns altogether the fleshly 
aspects of love. One exception is found among the early 
poems in the striking ballad called "The Sisters," but this 
is an obvious imitation of the ancient ballad poetry, in 
which passion is indeed a prime motive, but is always 
treated with a healthy frankness. But the poem partially 
fails as a perfect imitation of the ancient ballad, simply 
because Tennyson cannot allude to unchaste passion with- 
out a burst of terrible denunciation — 

She died: she went to burning flame. 
She mixed her ancient blood with shame. 
The wind is howling in turret and tree. 

He leaps upon the desecrator of human love with a bitter 
wrath, and with words like the sword-flash of an avenging 



86 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

angel. The other great example of Tennyson's treatment 
of the baser side of love is the unlawful love of Guinevere. 
But even here again he manifests the same sternness of 
avenging purity. Not by one touch, one veiled hint or 
half a word, does he seek to move the springs of evil con- 
cupiscence in his reader. What he sees again is not the 
fleshly side of unlawful passion, but the spiritual. From 
the sin of Guinevere springs the ruin of an empire. Her 
outrage upon purity is avenged in the downfall of that 
great kingdom of chivahy which Arthur had built up with 
infinite toil. The great purpose of that kingdom was that 
it should be God's kingdom on earth. The work of its 
great knights was 

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs. 
Their rule of conduct was 

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 
To love one maiden only, cleave to her. 
And worship her by years of noble deeds 
Until they won her. 

And now what happened? Arthur tells her she has spoilt 
the purpose of his life — 

Well is it that no child is born of thee. 

The children born of thee are sword and fire. 

Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. 

The carnal sin of one guilty woman has shattered into 
utter ruin the noblest kingdom ever built upon the earth. 
That is the one awful fact which Tennyson sees, and that 
is the keynote to the whole poem. Where other poets 
might have seen a subject on which they could lavish all 
the wealth of sensuous imagery, he sees not the manner 



Tennyson — Love and Woman 87 

of the sinning, and is not careful to paint it, but the infi- 
nite consequences of the sin streaming on, like a loosened 
flood of flame, working havoc and infinite wreck upon 
every side. Just as it is the spiritual cleansing of love 
which he paints when he tells us — 

Love took up the harp of Life, and struck on all the chords 

with might, 
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out 

of sight — 

so it is the spiritual and moral effect of the base selfish- 
ness of unchaste passion which he describes, when he 
paints the breaking up of the Round Table, and Arthur 
turning sadly away to lead his disheartened hosts 

Far down to that great battle in the west. 

It is this perfect and pellucid purity of Tennyson's 
mind which has enabled him to do many things impossible 
to others. Take, for instance, such a poem as "Godiva." 
A subject more difficult of handling it would be hard to 
find. The slightest prurience of thought would have been 
ruinous. So difficult and delicate is the theme that the 
merest feather-weight of over-description, a word too 
much, a shade of color too warm, a hint only of human heat, 
would upset the balance and turn a poem which sparkles 
with a crystal purity into a poem brilliant only with the 
iridescence of corrupt conception. Such a theme could 
not have been intrusted to Rossetti; scarcely, indeed, to 
Keats; absolutely not to Swinburne. To make it accept- 
able, not merely the most delicate lightness of touch was 
needed, but the most pellucid freshness of thought. 
Both Keats and Rossetti would have over-colored the 
picture, and left upon the taste the taint of an unwhole- 



88 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

some voluptuousness. What Swinburne would have made 
of it needs no sort of explanation. But Tennyson is able 
to treat it nobly, with simplicity and severity of touch, and 
he does so in sheer virtue of his own purity of heart. 
There is about him something of that divine quality which 
Guinevere discovers in King Arthur — 

The pure severity of perfect light. 

He has no cunning eye to discern anything in the sub- 
ject which can minister to the baser man. What he sees 
is a noble woman performing an heroic deed. He de- 
scribes her in imagery which clothes her as with a garment 
of light- 
She lingered, looking like a summer moon 
Half-dipt in cloud : anon she shook her head, 
And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee ; 
Unclad herself in haste ; adown the stair 
Stole on ; and, like a creeping sunbeam slid 
From pillar unto pillar. 
Then she rode forth clothed only with chastity. 

It is the moral significance of the scene which fasci- 
nates Tennyson — the spectacle of a woman sacrificing her- 
self for the people's good, and so building for herself an 
everlasting name. "Godiva" is a short poem, but it is 
invaluable as an index to the purity of Tennyson's genius, 
for no poet who was not penetrated by the utmost rever- 
ence for womanhood could have treated such a subject 
with such daring or such conspicuous success. 

This reverence of Tennyson for womanhood is marked 
in all his poems, and is an influence more or less apparent 
throughout his work. The early poems no less than the 
later abound in evidence of its sincerity. The very fact 
that so many of his poems describe women, and bear the 



Tennyson — Love and Woman 89 

names of women, is in itself significant. He bears con- 
stant testimony to the "finer female sense," and is careful 
that he shall not offend it by his "random string." 
Woman, as he conceives her, is the divinely purifying 
element in human life. Chivalry to w^oman is no mere 
romantic echo of the past: it is the sign manual of every 
noble soul. The apprehensions of woman are more deli- 
cate than man's; her instincts are surer, her intuition 
more certain, her spirit more gracious, more tender, and 
more divine. He who despises the intuitions of pure 
womanhood quenches a light which God has set in the 
world for his guidance and illumination. Of course this 
is no new doctrine, either in poetry or morals. But it 
came upon the world almost as a new doctrine in 1 830. 
The women of poetry fifty years ago — the women of 
Byron, to wit — had no sign of any divine intuition about 
them. They were warm, weak, and foolish. They never 
exercised the slightest control over men, except the sensu- 
ous control of passion. They were neither reverenced nor 
obeyed. They were the toys of desire, the beautiful and 
fragile playthings of an hour. Neither in poetry nor in 
real life was woman treated with reverential chastity of 
thought sixty years ago. The revolution and emancipa- 
tion of woman had not yet come. It was easy, therefore, 
for writers like Bulwer Lytton, throughout whose works 
there is scarcely one example of reverence for woman, and 
in which the prevalent conception of woman is debasingly 
gross and offensive, to mock Tennyson as "school-miss 
Arthur." It was easy to use the femininity of tone in 
the earlier poems as a weapon of insult against him. 
Bulwer Lytton had yet to discover that reverence for 
woman did not imply any lack of virility in manhood. No 



90 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

more stinging retort was ever made than the verse which 
"Miss Arthur" fixed upon the dandy author of "Pel- 
ham" — 

What profits it to understand 

The merits of a spotless shirt, 
A dapper foot, a little hand, 
If half the little soul be dirt ! 

For it was not weakness of fiber which bred in Tenny- 
son a reverence for woman, but nobility of spirit. And it 
was something more than this. It was the outcome of 
pure training under the gracious eyes of good women. 
The home was to Tennyson tlie highest and noblest 
expression of human life. His sympathy with romance 
and chivalry gave us exquisite sketches of mediaeval 
thought, like the "Lady of Shalott," and finally worked 
out the noblest series of poems in modern literature, "The 
Idylls of the King." The same romantic sympathy is 
apparent in such a poem of fairy fancy as the "Day- 
Dream." But the strongest movement of Tennyson's 
mind in the direction of woman-worship is toward 
domestic life. It is in married love the noblest blooming 
of love is found. It is there the divinest dreams of love 
are realized. Happy he to whom such joy is given, but 
the joy is not for all. 

Of love that never found his earthly close 

What sequel ? Streaming eyes, and breaking hearts ? 

Or all the same as if he had not been ? 

Not SO. When love and duty strive together, the victory 
is with duty. Any love snatched in defiance of duty is 
not true love: because it forgets reverence to womanhood, 
therefore it is base, and can only lead to moral disintegra- 
tion and corruption. Better far 



Tennyson — Love and Woman 91 

Such tears as flow but once a life, 

In that last kiss, which never was the last ! 

For to Tennyson so supreme is the passion of reverence 
for womanhood, so infinitely high and dear is womanly 
purity, that it becomes the key to everything really noble 
in human life, and any outrage upon that is the vilest of 
all sin — such sin as shakes the pillars of society and over- 
throws the majesty and might of empire. Reverence for 
woman and reverence for self go hand in hand. 

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
These three alone lead life to sov'reign power. 
Yet not for power (power of herself 
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law, 
Acting the law we live by without fear : 
And, because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 

But high as Tennyson sets woman, yet he retains a 
clear conception of the just and proper place of woman in 
society. She may inspire and lead man, but she is not 
equal with man. She may, indeed, govern men, but it is 
not by the right of superior intellectual endowment, but 
by the force of her nobility of soul. Her passions matched 
with man's 

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and water unto wine. 

That is a rough and dramatic way of expressing the truth, 
which Tennyson has worked out at large, with great 
subtlety and skill, in the remarkable poem of the "Prin- 
cess." 

The central point of the whole argument in the "Prin- 
cess" is, that woman was never meant to wrestle with man 
in the arena of intellectual pre-eminence or the active busi- 
ness of the world. He will reverence her to the utmost. 



92 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

but he will not abdicate in her favor. In fact, his very 
reverence is founded on her possession of certain qualities 
which man has in only a less degree, and those qualities 
are the highest, because they lead to the noblest results 
in the actual administration of human life. Man rules 
through the brain, woman through the heart. If man is 
to be ruled by woman it can only be a spiritual rule, not 
an intellectual. In nothing is the reasonableness of Tenny- 
son's mind better seen than in this poem. It would have 
been easy for him to become an impassioned advocate of 
women's rights. On the contrary, his very reverence for 
womanhood leads him to put certain limitations upon 
woman's empire, which do not hinder its influence, but 
rather intensify it. The power of woman is not to be 
wasted in vulgar strife with men for social pre-eminence: 
it is too rare, too subtle, too ethereal. That power finds 
its highest exercise in molding men to morality and pene- 
trating nations with the spirit of purity. The woman who 
is "slight-natured, miserable," prevents by her peevish- 
ness the growth of man. There is no strife between man 
and woman — 

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink 
Together, dwarfed or god-like, bond or free. 

They are "distinct in individualities," and the only bond 
of common life and toil is — 

Self-reverent each, and reverencing each. 

And the noble conclusion of the whole argument once 
more leads to that vision of the perfect home which never 
fades from the poet's heart — 

For woman is not undevelopt man, 

But diverse : could we make her as the man 



Tennyson — Love and Woman 93 

Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this, 

Not like to like, but like in difference. 

Yet in the long years liker must they grow; 

The man be more of woman, she of man ; 

He gain in sweetness and in moral height. 

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world; 

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, 

Nor lose the child-like in the larger mind: 

Till at the last she set herself to man 

Like perfect music unto noble words; 

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,- 

Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers, 

Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be. 

Finally, we may say of Tennyson's view of woman- 
hood that it is not easy to exaggerate the immense service 
he has rendered to society by his constant insistence on 
the nobility of purity, the divine grace of chastity. He 
has never glorified the wanton or clothed evil witli a 
golden mist of glowing words. He has kept his moral 
sense acute and sensitive, and has never confused the 
limits of right and wrong. With a clear and steady eye 
he has gazed upon the acts of unchaste passion, but not 
with sympathy, not with delirious yearning, not with any 
voluptuous quickening of the pulse; but always with loath- 
ing, with hatred, with the strenuous abhorrence of a noble 
heart, strong in its virgin purity. He has known where 
the secret of strength lay — 

His strength was as the strength of ten, 
Because his heart was pure. 

There is no taint upon his page. He has followed a high 
ideal, and has been consistent to it through a long life. 
For him vice has had no seduction; a jealous virtue has 
sat enthroned in the heart of his genius and preserved 



94 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

his mind unsullied. When we consider the bulk of his 
work, the multitude of his readers, the greatness of his 
influence, and when we contrast with him the influence 
and work of such a poet as Byron, we begin to under- 
stand how vast a service Tennyson has rendered to the 
cause of righteousness by the reverent ideal of womanhood 
he has maintained and the great example of purity which 
he has set. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. Compare Tennyson's general attitude toward women 
with that of some of the greater English poets. 

2. How is Tennyson's purity of mind illustrated in his treat- 
ment of Guinevere and of Godiva? 

3. Why did Tennyson's view of woman come to the world 
as a new doctrine? 

4. What was his idea of woman's sphere? 

5. Why is it not easy to exaggerate Tennyson's influence 
upon the social life of his time? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Tennyson : His Art and Relation to Modern Life. Stopford 
A. Brooke. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry Van Dyke. 

Three Great Teachers of Our Time — Carlyle, Tennyson, 
Ruskin. A. H. Japp. 

Lessons from My Masters {Carlyle, Tentiyson, Ruskin). 
Peter Bayne. 



CHAPTER X 

TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY 

It is hardly to be expected of a poet that he should be 
required to define his views on sociology, or that he should 
begin his work in imaginative literature with any cut-and- 
dried social creed, which it is his mission to propagate. 
No great poet has ever set out with any such propaganda. 
Wordsworth and the Lake poets did profess a definite 
creed, and drew up a statement of their principles, but 
they were purely literary principles. There was nothing 
in these principles to lead the Lake poets toward any 
common view of human life or human society. Each 
took his own course apart from the literary principles they 
professed in common, and it was inevitable that he should. 
Training, idiosyncrasy, environment, the social status of 
the poet, the methods of his education, the opportunities 
he may have of knowing the world, or the reverse — all 
these, and a thousand other causes, contribute to the 
shaping of his thought and the consequent attitude of his 
mind toward human life. But though a poet may have 
no definite intention of drawing up any philosophic inter- 
pretation of life, he usually succeeds in doing so. He 
cannot help himself. He is bound to furnish himself with 
some answer to the great problems that press upon him 
hungrily, with a dreadful insistence, a voice that cannot be 
silenced. Some ideal of human society he must have, and 
he cannot help comparing things as they are with things 

95 



g6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

as he would make them. It is the ideal which he ponders 
in his heart which gives utterance to his tongue. His 
ideal rules him. It is ever before him. He may be him- 
self unconscious of the persistence of its influence, but not 
the less that influence is always with him and is clearly 
traceable. It is like a colored glass through which the 
light of the mind streams: every thought comes to us 
tinged with the ideal conceptions of the thinker. When 
at last the finished work of a poet lies before us, then we 
perceive, and perhaps he also perceives for the first time, 
that there is a unity and sharpness of outline in his thought 
which is clear and distinctive. A hint there, a phrase 
here, a verse yonder — and silently the underlying thought 
of the poet emerges. Bone comes to its bone, till at last, 
with every reticulation complete, the skeleton rises clothed 
in flesh, and the ideal of human life which was jealously 
hidden in the poet's heart stands before us complete and 
undisguised. 

Now, perhaps the first thing that occurs to the reader 
who approaches Tennyson from this point of view is his 
sense of order. The tendency of his mind is distinctly 
conservative. He hears, indeed, "the roll of the ages," 
and he is not unconscious of the revolutionary elements 
which seethe in society; but he hears, if not with unsym- 
pathetic stoicism, at least with an equanimity too settled 
for disturbance. He is full of reverence for antiquity, he 
is filled with an all-sufficing sense of the perfection and 
indestructible stability of all English institutions. His 
mind is too calm and steady to be sympathetic toward the 
passionate revolts and despairing heroisms of those who 
seek an immediate reform of society; he is, indeed, too 
cool in temper to catch the glow of such movements as 



Tennyson's View of Life and Society 97 

these. The place in which he habitually walks and medi- 
tates is like that pathway which he has described in the 
"Gardener's Daughter" — 

A well-worn pathway courted us 
To one green wicket in a privet-hedge; 
This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk 
Thro' crowded lilac-ambush trimly pruned; 

And over many a range 
Of waving limes the gray cathedral towers. 
Across a hazy glimmer of the west, 
Reveal their shining windows. 

Now, what are the details of this picture? What is the 
effect it produces on the imagination? The chief idea it 
conveys is a sense of perfect order. The pathway is well- 
worn with the feet of generations; the green wicket is 
framed in a perfectly neat and symmetrical privet-hedge; 
the lilac-bush, in its utmost joy of burgeoning and blos- 
som, must be allowed no license — it is "trimly pruned"; 
and finally, as if to complete the sense of well-established 
use, of absolute propriety, of faultless order and reverent 
conservatism, the gray cathedral walls bound the view, 
and the shining windows seem to reflect the glory of the 
past. In this passage we have a not inapt illustration of 
the strongest tendency of Tennyson's mind. It is from 
such a neat and quiet bower of peace he looks out upon the 
world. He is a recluse, shut up with his own thoughts, 
and weaving the bright thread of his fancy far from the 
loud commotions of the world. He loves to surround 
himself with influences which minister to this studious 
calm. In the garden where he walks no leaf is out of 
place, no grass-blade grows awry. If the world he looks 
upon hardly matches the spotless propriety of his retreat. 



98 Literary Leaders of Modern E^ngland 

yet, at least, the world shows itself upon the whole a very 
proper and well-governed world. Accidents will happen 
in the best-regulated societies, but in England at all events 
they are blessedly rare. Our roots run deep and we 
stand above the shocks of time. We have gray cathedrals, 
excellent clergy, gracious noblemen, stately homes sur- 
rounded by the greenest of lawns, which might almost 
justify the eloquent eulogism of the Cambridge gardener, 
who remarked that such turf could only be got "by mow- 
ing 'em and rolling 'em, rolling 'em and mowing 'em, for 
thousands of years!" The axiom, that "Order is heaven's 
first law," has been fully accepted by Tennyson, and has 
received additional development: to him order is also 
earth's best excellence. 

One has only to glance through Tennyson's poems of 
modern life to see that this criticism is neither spiteful nor 
unjust. He is usually found in the company of lords and 
ladies, princesses, scholars, and generally refined people, 
whose place in society is fully assured. There are excep- 
tions to this statement, of course, which will occur to 
every reader. He has studied the northern farmer to 
good effect, and in the "May Queen" and "Dora" we 
have admirable pictures of country life. But this does 
not affect the general truth of the statement. Claribel, 
Lilian, Isabel, Mariana, are not daughters of the people. 
Lady Clara Vere de Vere certainly receives condign chas- 
tisement, but still she is Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Maud 
lives in the stately hall, and the village where her lover 
meets her is the sort of perfect village, "with blossomed 
gable-ends," which we only see upon a great estate. 
When he bitterly assails a lord, it is a new-made lord, 
with a gewgaw title new as his castle, "master of half a 



Tennyson's View of Life and Society 99 

servile shire," and clothed with the rank insolence of 
recent wealth. When he alludes to trade it is with the 
usual aristocratic contempt, and the ear of the merchant 

Is crammed with his cotton, and rings 
Even in dreams, to the chink of his pence. 

It is true that he can cry, 

Ah, God, for a man with a heart, head, hand, 
Like some of the simple great ones gone 

Forever and ever by : 
One still strong man in a blatant land, 
Whatever they call him, what care I — 
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat, one 
Who can rule and dare not lie ! 

But this is, after all, merely the wail of an angry pessi- 
mism. It is the sort of jeremiad in which timid minds 
usually indulge when the ancient order of things seems 
threatened. Of true democratic feeling Tennyson is sin- 
gularly destitute. His leaning is all the other way. It is 
the sustained splendor and delicate refinement of aristo- 
cratic life which fascinate him. His heart is with the 
ancient order of things, and all his modern poems breathe 
the spirit of this sentiment. It follows, therefore, that 
Tennyson never has been, and never can be, in the true 
sense, a people's poet. That he has written poems which 
the very poorest value, and which might rejoice the heart 
of the peasant, we gladly admit. Probably the "May 
Queen" is far and away the most popular poem he ever 
wrote, and it is so because it touches the hearts of homely 
people. But in the main there is little for the common 
people in Tennyson's poetry. It knocks at the door of 
the lady's bower, but not at the poor man's cottage. Its 
troops of knights and ladies, and exquisitely dressed and 
L.cfC. 



lOO Literary Leaders of Modern England 

admirably nurtured people, seem out of place amid the 
coarse realities of grimed and toiling life. To those who 
stand among the shadows of life, those who suffer or fight 
in the hard battles of humanity, and feel the cruel irony 
and mockery of circumstance, it may well seem that Tenny- 
son's laudation of order is in itself an irony, that the pup- 
pets on his stage know little of the great throbbing heart 
of the common people, and that their fine talk is, after all, 
a little too finical to pierce into the most secret chambers 
of the human memory. 

A further evidence of this limitation of sympathy in 
Tennyson is found in his treatment of social questions. 
He does not ignore them; he sees them indeed, and some 
of his lines, such as the following from the opening of 
"Maud," quiver with a passionate indignation: 

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head 

Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife, 

And chalk and alum and plaster are sold the poor for bread, 
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life. 

But it is not in mere denunciation of existing evils that the 
true poet should spend himself. The true poet seeks to 
probe the heart of the world's sorrow, and we turn to him 
to know what verdict he can give, and whether there is 
any hope. Tennyson has no distinctive reply to such 
questions as these, or if any reply, it is a hopeless one. 
He perceives the glorious growth of science, he foreshad- 
ows the vast discoveries of a larger age, he is sure that 
on the whole the world means progress; but when he 
brings himself face to face with the actual details of life 
lived in poverty, squalor, and crime, he is sullenly unhope- 
ful. He looks upon the whole question from the point of 
view of the comfortable burgess, not of the poor man him- 



Tennyson's View of Life and Society loi 

self who stands amid the grime of the actual sacrifice. 
He gazes down from his sunny vantage-ground of esthetic 
refinement, where "no wind blows roughly," and ponders, 
speculates, sympathises, but his philosophic calm is undis- 
turbed. He never steps down into the thick of the strug- 
gle and makes those who unjustly suffer feel that in him 
they have a comrade and a champion. When the sudden 
light of some glowing, some delusive hope is f!ung across 
their wasted faces, he is quick to tell them that the hope 
is delusive, and to rebuke them for their excess of fond 
credulity. One of his characters is described as running — 

A Malayan muck against the times; 

but when we wait to be told exactly in what his offending 
lies, we find that it simply amounts to this, that he 

Had golden hopes for France and all mankind. 

This is tvpical of Tennyson's point of view of social ques- 
tions. There is no living heat of enthusiasm in him: he 
is wrapped in a chilly mantle of reserve, and he chills the 
ardent as he talks with them. When he proposes a great 
concession to the poor, what is it? 

Why should not these great sirs 
Give up their parks some dozen times a year 
To let the people breathe? 

That is all: a mere act of justice, an imperfect recognition 
of the truth that property has duties as well as privileges; 
but it is announced as though it were a revolution, and as 
if the poet himself were astonished at his own daring. 
Perhaps, however, the sense of daring is not surprismg 
when we find that the proposal was made to a stalwart 
baronet — 



I02 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

A patron of some thirty charities, 
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain, 
A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none, 
Fair-haired, and redder than a windy morn. 

And practically, this is as far as Tennyson ever goes 
in his treatment of social questions. He does not really 
grasp them. He does not understand the intensity of 
peril or the grave considerations of justice which under- 
lie them. He stands aloof, in the company of baronets 
and princesses, courtly and cultured people, whose life is 
perfumed with pleasure and cut off from all intrusion of 
tragic misery; those who fare sumptuously every day, to 
whom poetry is an exquisite luxury of the mind as fine 
color is to the eye, or delicate flavor to the appetite: and 
it is to these Tennyson sings, and it is their view of life 
which finds the fullest reflection in his poetry. 

It is characteristic of the scientific spirit that it rigidly 
attends to facts and classifies them, finally deducing from 
them great laws which appear to underlie and control all 
things. Thus, in his treatment of nature, Tennyson's 
love of science has worked in the direction of accuracy of 
statement and fidelity of delineation. But in his view of 
life it has checked generous enthusiasm and produced 
coldness of temper. The survival of the fittest is not in 
truth a doctrine likely to produce a sympathetic temper 
toward the crippled and the unfortunate. It does indeed 
kindle a great light in the future. It pictures the final 
evolution of man into some unimagined state of strength 
and joy, when he shall have attained his majority and 
entered into the scientific paradise which truth is prepar- 
ing for him. 

So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man, 



1 ennyson's View of Life and Society 103 

that we may well consider him, not as having reached his 
true height, but as toiling on to something higher even 
than he dreams. But however bright may be the vision 
of the future, the survival of the fittest is poor comfort in 
the vast interval. It has nothing to say to the halt and 
maimed, except that they deserve to be halt and maimed. 
It can rejoice in the vast movements of society, which, like 
immense waves, carry it onward to its infinite goal, but it 
has no compassion for the lives sacrificed every day in 
this predetermined progress. And as one turns over the 
pages of Tennyson, he sometimes finds himself wondering 
whether Tennyson has ever suffered deeply. Personal 
suffering, the agony of severed love which comes to all, 
he has known; but there is another form of sorrow, the 
sorrow of early disappointment and rebuff, which does far 
more to educate men into breadth and charity of view; 
and by the buffeting angels of vicissitude he has been 
unvisited. Life may be too fortunate, things may go too 
well with men in this world. The liquor of life may cor- 
rupt with excess of sweetness; and for lack of that whole- 
some bitter of disappointment, which is God's frequent 
medicine to the greatest, a man's heart may stagnate in an 
undiscerning content. Is this absence of vicissitude part 
of the reason for the comparative limitation of sympathy 
which we find in Tennyson's view of life.'' He has been 
attended by worldly fortune and success never before 
vouchsafed to any English poet. How different the life 
that closed in sorrowful isolation at Dumfries, or the life 
cut off by the violence of tempest at Spezzia, to the close 
of this life in fortune, fame, and peerage! How different 
the plain life and simple house from which came to us the 
"Ode on Intimations of Immortality" to the cultured life 



I04 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

of artistic ease in whicli the "Idylls of the King" have 
been slowly fashioned and perfected in fastidious patience! 
Doubt it as we may, resent it as we do, nevertheless the 
truth remains that those whose words live longest in the 
hearts of men have "learned in suffering what they taught 
in song." In them the heart has most maintained a child- 
like simplicity and sympathy, and to them it has been 
given to survey life with the largest charity of hope. Is 
it this lack of vicissitude in the life of the poet himself 
which has dulled the larger sympathies of his nature and 
narrowed the range and spirit of his poetry.'' Has he too 
long, like his own Maud, 

Fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life? 

It is hard to judge; but no one can be unconscious of the 
fact of this limitation. Its causes lie partly in the order 
of the poet's life, but mainly in the character of his own 
mind, which is dispassionate rather than ardent, philosophic 
rather than sympathetic, and better fitted to touch with 
subtle delicacy the fringe of a great problem than to pene- 
trate its bloom with true imaginative insight. 

The final impression which we take, then, from the 
modern poems of Tennyson is, that his view of life and 
society is dull and conventional. The greater portion of 
his poetry consists of reproductions — reproductions from 
the antique, from the mediccval, from the romantic. And 
this is in itself significant, because it shows how largely 
he has turned his mind away from the vision of the present. 
When he touches the mediaeval and antique world he is at 
his best. All the graceful qualities of his mind then come 
into play, and he clothes the past with a glamour of words 
which soothes the mind and kindles the imagination with 



Tennyson's View of Life and Society 105 

a keen delight. But in spite of all his attempts, laborious 
and partially successful as they are, to seize the modern 
spirit, he has failed in the main. He has nothing new to 
say: all that he can do is to take old and well-worn ideas 
and clothe them with a novelty of phrase which gives them 
fresh currency. He has little faculty of piercing through 
the husk of the conventional to the living thoughts and 
passions of man which throb beneath. He passes by, as 
a careless tourist might pass over a volcanic district, 
admiring the flowers and color, but not suspecting the 
angry fire which boils below his feet. He finds every- 
where just what conventional opinion says you ought to 
find; he has no strength to tear aside the thin crust and 
discover the passionate possibilities and sad realities which 
are decorously hidden from the thoughtless eye. He 
skims the surface: he does not probe the depth. Divest 
his figures of the garb of musical speech in which they 
move, and there is nothing left but commonplace thought 
and sentiment. Like the "passon" in the "Northern 
Farmer," they say what they "ow't to 'a said," and we 
come away with a convincing sense of their entire respec- 
tability. They talk, in fact, very much like Anthony 
TroUope's deans and churchmen, who look out upon life 
with a curious mixture of sedate thoughtfulness and deco- 
rous conservatism. The general effect they produce upon 
the mind is dullness. But if Tennyson's view of life is 
dull, and his opinions commonplace, we cannot but admit 
that all that the art of the most perfect phrasing can do to 
cover dullness Tennyson has done. He has, indeed, so 
dexterously concealed the comparative poverty of his 
thought in all his modern poems with the eloquence and 
beauty of his language that many people have not yet dis- 



io6 Literary Leaders ot Modern England 

covered the deception. Nevertheless it is there. The 
fact that so few are aware of it is sufficient testniiony to 
the perfection of the artistic illusion. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. How does a poet usually work out his philosophy of life? 

2. How is " the sense of order" felt in Tennyson's poems? 

3. How does this quality of his character affect his view of 
human society? 

4. Why is he not in the true sense " a people's poet "? 

5. Give illustrations of his treatment of great social ques- 
tions. 

6. How may these qualities of the poet's work be explained ? 

7. Why is the commonplace character of his views of life 
not always perceived? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Tennysoti : His A rt and Relation to Moderji Life. Stopf ord 
A. Brooke. 

The Poetry of Te7inyso]i. Henry Van Dyke. 

The Mind of Tennyson. 

Literary Studies ( Wordsworth, Te7i7iyson and Browning), 
Vol. LI. Walter Bagehot. 



CHAPTER XI 

IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING" 

We have now come to the point in our study of Tenny- 
son where his two greatest poems, the "Idylls of the 
King" and "In Memoriam," come into review. There 
are, however, certain groups of poems which can scarcely 
be passed unmentioned; and before turning to the two 
greatest works of Tennyson it may be well to glance at 
these. Everywhere throughout Tennyson's books there 
are to be found exquisite clusters of lyrical poems, and it 
may be said with confidence that in this domain of poetry 
his power is unrivaled and his excellence supreme. It is 
this excellence which redeems " Maud, " in all other 
respects the weakest and least artistic of his long poems. 
The "Princess," again, wearisome and dull as it becomes 
in parts, contains three or four of the most musical lyrics 
Tennyson has ever written, and snatches of melody which 
will bear comparison with the finest lyrics in the language. 
The art in which Tennyson's rarest excellence lies, the 
art of musical expression, the subtle cadence of rhythm 
which produces a recurring and never-forgotten sweetness 
in the memory, is seen at its very best in these short and 
lovely lyrics. The lines in the "Princess" commencing, 

The splendor falls on castle walls, 

may be mentioned in this category as the nearest approach 
to the effect of fine music which language is able to pro- 

107 



io8 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

duce, and in glamour and sweetness they are unapproached 
by any modern poet. Of poems like these nothing can 
be said but praise. They have gone far to constitute the 
charm of Tennyson, They have found their way into the 
general memory without effort, by virtue of an enchant- 
ment all their own. They will probably be remembered 
when much of his more ambitious work is forgotten. 
Indeed, it may b*e said that already this process has been 
accomplished in part, and the chief thing which preserves 
"Maud" from oblivion is the famous garden song, "Come 
into the Garden, Maud," one of the most finished and 
impassioned lyrics that is to be found in the whole range 
of modern English. In lyrical power and sweetness, in 
the power of uttering that "lyrical cry," as it has been 
called, that species of poem which is, in truth, not so 
much a poem as a cry, a voice, a gust of thrilling music — 
in this art Tennyson has few rivals and no peer. 

To another class of poems in which Tennyson has 
attained high excellence he has himself given an appro- 
priate title when he calls them English Idylls. The more 
famous is "Enoch Arden," the most exquisite is "Dora." 
When "Enoch Arden" was published, great exception was 
taken .to its method and structure, and its obvious want of 
simplicity in diction was held to disqualify its title to be 
called an Englishid yll. In subject it is purely idyllic; in 
diction it is elaborately ornate. One of the acutest and 
most brilhant of Enghsh critics, Mr. Walter Bagehot, has 
pointed out the fact that in no single instance throughout 
the poem is Tennyson content to speak in the language of 
simplicity. The phrases are often happy, often express- 
ive, but always stiff with an elaborate word-chiseling. 
To express the very homely circumstance that Enoch 



Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 109 

Arden was a fisherman and sold fish, we are told that he 
vended "ocean-spoil in ocean-smelling osier." The de- 
scription of the gateway of the Hall is almost pretentious 
in its combination of complex phrases: "portal-warding 
lion-whelp, and the peacock yew-tree." This is no doubt 
an excellent description of tropic scenery: 

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts, 

Among the palms and ferns and precipices; 

The blaze upon the waters to the east, 

The blaze upon his island overhead; 

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 

The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail. 

But this is not a shipwrecked sailor's description of what 
he would see, nor is there a single phrase such as a 
homely seaman would be likely to use in all this elaborate 
passage. "The hollower-bellowing ocean" is a combi- 
nation such as an ornate poet, anxious to combine his 
impressions in a complex phrase, might use; but it would 
not by any possibility be the phrase of Enoch Arden. As 
an English idyll, therefore, "Enoch Arden" fails. As a 
poem of the ornate school it is excellent. But in "Dora" 
we have the simplest story of country life told in the sim- 
plest words, and with an almost Wordsworthian austerity 
of phrase. There is nothing to disturb the charm of per- 
fect verisimilitude. It is, however, a poem almost by 
itself. Nowhere else does Tennyson work so high an 
effect by such simple means. In the main he is an ornate 
poet and errs in over-elaboration of phrase. In the 
"Idylls of the King" the same strength and weakness are 
always associated, and the excellence and defect run side 
by side. As his narrative rises in passion the phraseology 



iio Literary Leaders of Modern England 

becomes terser, clearer, less involved; when his invention 
slackens, and his poetic impulse ebbs, he always falls back 
upon elaborate phrase-coining to cover his defect. The 
result is a curious combination such as exists in no other 
poet. In a score of pages we pass a dozen times from 
the noble severity of Wordsworth to the fanciful conceit 
of Keats. It is never difficult to know how the tide of 
poetic impulse runs in Tennyson: when the impulse is 
strong the style clarifies into nervous simplicity; when 
weak, it abounds in ornate decoration and scholastic word- 
mongering. 

The "Idylls of the King" are the work of Tennyson's 
mature manhood, and give us the ripest result of his art. 
The history of their inception and completion is curious; 
it covers fifty years, beginning with a lyric; "then with 
an epical fragment and three more lyrics; then with a 
poem, 'Enid and Nimue,' which is suppressed as soon as 
it is written; then with four romantic idylls, followed ten 
years later by four others, and two years later by two 
others, and thirteen years later by yet another idyll, which 
is to be placed not before or after the rest, but in the very 
center of the cycle." Thus the world of Arthurian 
romance is first touched in the "Lady of Shalott," pub- 
lished in 1832; and last, in "Balin and Balan," published 
in 1885. 

Since the completion of the "Idylls" Tennyson has 
written little of really first-rate excellence or gravity. His 
finest thoughts and finest lines are here. They are his 
magnum opus, and on them his claim to fame must largely 
rest. In the life of every great poet there comes a time 
when a desire seizes him to accomplish some great de- 
sign, a poem on a scale of magnitude which shall give 



Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 1 1 1 

scope to all his qualities. As a rule, such ambitions have 
resulted in failure. Wordsworth is not known, after all, 
by his "Excursion," but by his lyrics and his "Ode on 
Immortality." Mrs. Browning's "Drama of Exile" can- 
not contest the awards of fame with the "Lines on 
Cowper's Grave." The only long poem by an English 
author which has held an uncontested place in memory is 
Milton's "Paradise Lost," and it has been pointed out 
that this is largely owing to the fact that it is written in 
sections, and each section can be read at a sitting. No 
doubt Tennyson was fully conscious of the peril of his 
task, and the warning of these great examples, when he 
began to work upon the "Idylls." He began at the end 
of his theme, with the "Morte d'Arthur, " as though to 
judge of his chances of success by an experiment on the 
public taste. He was fortunate also in the choice of a 
subject. In the noble myths which had gathered round 
King Arthur there was a vast field of poetry which was 
wholly un worked. Over and above their moral and poetic 
elements they possessed a national value. For Tennyson 
they had always had a peculiar charm, and we are told 
that in his solitary boyhood at Somersby a favorite 
recreation was to enact scenes from the Round Table 
with his brothers. These myths provided him with 
precisely what he was least able to provide himself, a 
splendid story, or series of stories, ready to his hand. 
No critical reader can help noticing that in the power of 
pure invention Tennyson is singularly weak. It is the 
weakness of his invention which led to the vicious elabo- 
ration of style which we have remarked in * ' Enoch Arden. ' ' 
But in the old chronicle of Sir Thomas Malory of the 
fabulous deeds of the Knights of the Round Table there 



112 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

is a series of stories complete in every incident and detail. 
The chronicle is full of graphic force and poetic merit. It 
is indeed so full of the genuine elements of poetry that 
many persons who have carefully read Sir Thomas 
Malory refuse to think that Tennyson has improved upon 
him. In many senses he has not. He has often failed 
where Malory is strongest, necessarily, perhaps, because to 
make Malory acceptable to modern ears it was needful to 
smooth over a good many awkward details. But what 
Tennyson has done is to imbue the old chronicle with new 
life and spirit, to interpret it by a Christian insight, and 
to apply its ancient lessons to the complex conditions of 
modern life and thought. 

Probably one reason why Tennyson chose Sir Thomas 
Malory's famous chronicle for his greatest experiment in 
verse was, that it exactly coincided with his own natural 
bent toward romantic allegory. We have to remember 
the force of the pre-Raphaelite movement, as it was called, 
if we are to understand the reasons of Tennyson's choice. 
From the simple nature-worship of Wordsworth, and the 
more ethereal and ecstatic nature-worship of Shelley, there 
had come a revulsion toward the glowing spectacle of 
mediaeval life and the chivalrous bent of mediaeval 
thought. Just as the publication of the "Reliques 
of English Ballad Poetry," by Bishop Percy, in the 
end of the eighteenth century, worked a revival of 
mediaeval sentiment, whose best fruit is found in the great 
romances of Sir Walter Scott, so the experiments of Ros- 
setti and Morris worked a similar revival in our own. 
Among the weird half-lights of medieval history there lay 
a land of old romance, full of material for the poet. 
Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott," "Sir Galahad," and "St. 



Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 113 

Agnes" were early experiments in this field of poetry, and 
indicate how deeply he had felt its fascination. It was 
only natural that he should pursue the clue which he had 
thus discovered. In the mediaeval England of knight and 
lady, tournament and battle, spell and incantation, adven- 
ture and romance, Tennyson found an atmosphere entirely 
suited to his genius. It was the land of glamour and 
enchantment. There the imagination and fancy could 
move untrammeled. Every knight was brave and every 
lady fair. Magnificent spectacles continually passed before 
the imagination, and afforded a decorative artist like 
Tennyson the finest possible opportunity for the exercise 
of that species of art in which he most excelled. And over 
and above all this, there ran throughout the record of the 
history a strong moral sentiment, a deep religious bias. 
The fall of King Arthur's Round Table was the fall of a 
kingdom, and the causes of its fall were moral causes. 
In this respect it was more than a mere mediaeval record: 
it was an eternal parable of human life. It touched the 
moral sense in Tennyson, which had always been quick 
and sensitive. What theme was there more likely to 
stimulate his genius than this, and more suitable for a 
great epic .'' The greatest of all themes Milton had taken, 
but even if he had not, it was too late to write a religious 
epic. The "Paradise Lost" could only have been written 
in a theological age — an age like the Puritan, deeply satu- 
rated with the theological spirit. To hit the taste of the 
nineteenth century an epic might be a morality, but it 
needed also human sentiment and passion in all their full- 
ness. With that perfect artistic insight which has rarely 
failed him, Tennyson saw the value of his theme, and the 
result is, that he has produced the only long poem which 



114 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

has been read by multitudes since "Paradise Lost," and 
a poem which, in parts at least, may fairly challenge com- 
parison with the noblest work of Milton. 

The "Idylls of the King," as Tennyson handles them, 
are a very different thing from the simple chronicle of 
Malory. It is extremely interesting to compare passages 
and see how far Tennyson has followed and where he has 
left Malory. As regards the story itself, he has inserted 
many poetic fancies, but he has invented little or nothing. 
The incidents run parallel. In some points, as we have 
said, there is a graphic force in Malory which we miss in 
Tennyson, and the short, simple words of the mediaeval 
chronicler produce a deeper effect upon the mind than the 
rich and subtle diction of the modern poet. It is the 
difference between the rude but thrilling ballad tune and 
the skillful variations made upon it by a great musical com- 
poser. In Malory we think of the theme; in Tennyson 
more frequently of the artist. But if any one desires to 
see how finely a poetic fancy can breathe life into a bald 
history, he has only to mark how faithfully Tennyson has 
seized upon the salient points of Malory and what a 
wealth of artistic skill he has lavished on them; for the 
chief fact to be observed in Tennyson's use of Malory is, 
that to the plain facts of the chronicler he always gives an 
allegorical significance. He never loses sight of the moral 
lesson. King Arthur stands out as a mystic incarnation, 
a Christ-man — pure, noble, unerring- — coming mysteri- 
ously into the world and vanishing mysteriously, accord- 
ing to the prophecy of Merlin: 

From the great deep to the great deep he goes. 
He is the perfect flower of purity and chivalry, and the 



Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 115 

kingdom he seeks to found is the very kingdom of Christ 
upon the earth. Lancelot, in many respects the more 
subtle and powerful study, is of the earth, earthy, and by 
turns base and noble, and rightly describes himself in the 
hour of his remorse : 

In me there dwells 
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch 
Of greatness to know well I am not great: 
There is the man. 

It is round these two men and Guinevere that the great 
interest of the poem culminates. The very over-nobleness 
of Arthur works disaster, and Guinevere cries: 

He is all fault who has no fault at all, 

For who loves me must have a touch of earth; 

The low sun makes the color. 

The pathos of the whole poem is, that in Arthur we have 
the incarnation of a high ideal which men vainly strive 
after, and its tragedy is, that men do strive vainly, and that 
all the noble work of Arthur is undone by the weakness 
and folly of his followers. In the lesser characters of the 
epic the allegorical bent is more fully developed. Sir 
Galahad is the type of glorified asceticism, visionary aims, 
spirit triumphant over flesh, but after all following wander- 
ing fires in a vain quest, and "leaving human wrongs to 
right themselves." "Gareth and Lynette" is but a vari- 
ation of the story of Arthur and Guinevere, and it points 
to the severity of struggle which awaits him who over- 
comes the flesh. In this poem the allegory is more 
distinct and beautiful than in either of the others, and 
Tennyson has given us no nobler conception of victory 
over death than this: 



ii6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

The huge pavilion slowly yielded up 
Thro' those black foldings that which housed within; 
High on a night-black horse, in night-black arms, 
In the half-light, thro' the dim dawn, advanced 
The monster, and then paused, and spake no word. 

It is the King of Terrors, the spectral form of the last 
enemy. But when Gareth rides forth to the combat, and 
strikes the helm of his grisly foe — 

Out from this 
Issued the bright face of a blooming boy, 
Fresh as a flower new-born. 

And this is immortality, the life which springs out of 
death. 

Of the tenderness of "Lancelot and Elaine," with its 
immortal picture of the dead Elaine sailing to her last 
home, oared by the dumb servitor; the grandeur of the 
"Last Tournament," with its ever-present sense of deso- 
lation; the unapproachable pathos of "Guinevere," in- 
creasing stanza by stanza in passionate depth and tragic 
force, till we reach the parting with Arthur in the misty 
darkness, amid the faint blowing of the unhappy trumpets; 
and of the solemnity of the "Passing of Arthur," with its 
dramatic fullness, its farewell counsels of neglected wisdom, 
its tragic mixture of human despair and mystic heavenly 
hope — of these poems it is needless to speak. If we had 
to choose the greatest poem of Tennyson, we should 
choose "Guinevere"; if the most solemnly impressive, the 
"Passing of Arthur." Nothing which he has written 
rivals these two, or approaches them in the highest quali- 
ties of poetry. They are the mature work of a great 
poet. They express his deepest convictions and sum up 
his best wisdom. Such passages as — 



Idylls and the "Idylls of the King" 117 

More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain for me night and day; 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
Tliat nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God; 

or — 

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 

And God fulfills Himself in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world — 

have already passed into the permanent currency of litera- 
ture. They contain noble truths nobly expressed. And 
among the artistic lessons of the "Idylls of the King" 
none is better worth marking than the perfection of 
Tennyson's blank verse. Blank verse is the one distinc- 
tively English measure, and the most difficult of all. 
Apparently it is easy of attainment; in reality there is 
nothing harder. There is no form of verse wrhich so 
severely tests the ear and musical faculty of a great poet. 
Keats attempted it in "Hyperion" with magnificent suc- 
cess, but he gave it up after that one supreme effort. 
Wordsworth's success is only partial, and there are many 
passages in the "Excursion" which are little better than 
prose cut up into metrical lengths. Byron never touched 
it without complete failure. Milton only has chosen it as 
his supreme method of utterance for epic poetry, and he 
has used it as only a giant could use it. Next to Milton 
stands Tennyson. He sinks far below Milton in grandeur, 
but he excels him in musical modulation. He does not 
fill the air vi^ith the wave-like majesty of sound and move- 



ii8 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

ment which characterize Milton, but he soothes it with an 
unfaihng melody of phrase. It is so distinctive that the 
merest tyro could not fail to recognize the peculiar charm 
of Tennyson's blank verse and distinguish it at once in 
any company. Often it is mannered, and mannerism is 
always a vice. But in the finest qualities of assonance 
and resonance Tennyson rarely fails. His verse moves 
with perfect ease, with perfect music, with perfect 
strength; and apart from the charm of thought and sub- 
ject, the "Idylls of the King" show his metrical talent in 
its finest operation. But the theme also is great and 
solemn, and in the "Idylls of the King" we have his 
noblest work, and work such as the very greatest poets 
might have been proud to produce and covetous to claim. 

QUESTIONS P^OR REVIEW 

1. How do Tennyson's gifts show ai their best in his lyric 
poems? 

2. How do his two "idylls" illustrate some of his most 
characteristic traits? 

3. Ill what order did Tennyson produce "The Idylls of the 
King"? 

4. What has been the experience of many poets with great 
literary projects? 

5. What were some of Tennyson's reasons for selecting the 
Arthur legends for his greatest work? 

6. How do Tennyson's "Idylls" compare with Malory's 
chronicle? 

7. In what does the pathos of the poem consist? 

8. Why do his " Idylls of the King" rank as his noblest 
work? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Tennyson : His A rt an d Relation to Modern Life. Stopf ord 
A. Brooke. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry Van Dyke. 
Essays on the Idylls of the King. Harold Littledale. 
Studies in the Idylls of the King. Henry Elsdale. 



CHAPTER XII 

TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM" 

We now come to the most distinctive, and in many 
essential characteristics, the greatest of Tennyson's 
poems, "In Memoriam." Pubhshed in 1850, it is the 
work of his prime, and contains the most perfect repre- 
sentation of his genius. The personal history on which it 
is founded is well known. It commemorates one of the 
noblest of human friendships, and one of the noblest of 
men. Arthur Hallam, the son of Henry Hallam, the 
celebrated historian, was born in Bedford Place, London, 
on the 1st of February, 181 1. The family afterward 
removed to Wimpole Street, which is thus described in 
"In Memoriam" : 

Dark house, by which once more I stand, 
Here in the long, unlovely street. 
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat 

So quickly, waiting for a hand. 

In October, 1828, Arthur Hallam went into residence at 
Cambridge, and it was there he met Tennyson. The 
affection which sprang up between them must have been 
immediate, for in 1830 we hnd them discussing a plan for 
publishing conjointly a volume of poems. One of Tenny- 
son's most striking phrases in the "Palace of Art," "the 
abysmal deeps of personality," is directly borrowed from 
a phrase of Hallam's: "God — with whom alone rest the 
abysmal secrets of personality." It was one of those rare 

119 



I20 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and beautiful friendships which sometimes visit the morning 
hours of hfe, in which intellectual sympathy, not less than 
love, plays a foremost part. On the 15th of September, 

1833, Arthur Hallam lay dead. On the 3d of January, 

1834, his body was brought over from Vienna, where he 
died, and was interred in manor aisle, Clevedon Church,* 
Somersetshire — 

The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darkened heart that beat no more; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore, 

And in the hearing of the wave. 

There twice a day the Severn fills; 
The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 

And makes a silence in the hills. 

When and where "In Memoriam" was conceived or 
commenced it is impossible for us to know, but it will thus 
be seen that seventeen years elapsed between the death of 
Arthur Hallam and the publication of Tennyson's exquisite 
elegy. It is quite possible that the poem was actually in 
process of construction during the whole of this long 
period, for it bears in itself marks of slow growth, of 
gradual accretion and elaboration. Probably the work was 
begim with one or two of the earlier sections, which simply 
bewail in poignant verse Tennyson's sense of unspeakable 
loss, and which possess the solemnity and self-contained- 
ness of separate funeral hymns, rather than the consecu- 
tiveness of an elaborate poem. The history and character 
of the poem sustain this view. In seventeen years the 
anguish of the deepest sorrow must needs show signs of 

* In the first edition of "In Memoriam"' Tennyson says in "the 
chancel." This was not strictly correct, and is altered in subsequent editions 
to " dark Church." 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 121 

healing. Grief grows less clamant and more meditative. 
It passes somewhat out of the region of personal bitter- 
ness into the realms of philosophic reflection and religious 
resignation. Time does not destroy the sense of loss, but 
it lifts the soul to a place of broader outlook and calmer 
vision. As we read "In Memoriam" this process is 
clearly detailed, and there is much in the structure of the 
poem to suggest that from a few mournful verses, cast off 
in the bitterest hour of bereavement as a solace to the 
wounded spirit, Tennyson gradually enlarged his plan, till 
he had woven into it all the philosophic doubts, the reli- 
gious hopes, the pious aspirations, which the theme of 
human loss could suggest to a thoughtful mind and noble 
spirit. 

Concerning the general structure and character ^of the 
poem, one or two things are worth remark. It differs 
essentially from any other elegy in the English language, 
both as to metrical arrangement and artistic color. English 
literature is not rich in elegy, but it possesses in Milton's 
"Lycidas," in Gray's famous poem, in Shelley's "Ado- 
nais, " and perhaps in Arnold's noble lamentation for his 
father and his "Thyrsis, " isolated specimens of elegiac 
poetry as fine as any literature can boasf. Of these great 
elegies, Shelley's "Adonais" is the longest and the no- 
blest; Milton's "Lycidas" the most classic in gravity and 
sweetness; Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" the 
most perfectly polished; Arnold's "Lines in Rugby 
Chapel" the most effective in moral view and spirit. But 
of the last two it will be at once perceived that neither 
aims at the constructive breadth of a prolonged poem, nor 
would the metrical form sustain the burden of great length. 
The constant evil which menaces elegy is monotony, and 



122 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

it is the most difficult to be avoided by the very nature of 
the theme. Gray avoids it by aiming at aphoristic brevity, 
and by pohshing every phrase with the most consummate 
artistic skill and patience. Arnold adopis for his purpose 
a peculiar unrhymed meter, which stimulates the ear with- 
out wearying it, but which could not be sustained except 
within the limits of brevity which he has set for himself. 
Milton is similarly brief, and "Lycidas" reads more like a 
noble fragment of the antique than an English poem writ- 
ten for English readers. No doubt Milton's genius would 
have served him perfectly if he had attempted a "Lycidas" 
of thrice the length, for he has attempted no form of 
poetry without absolute success; but however that may 
be, he was taught by his artistic instincts in writing elegy 
to compress within the narrovi-est limits of space his lament 
for the noble dead. Shelley does indeed write at length, 
but there are two things to sustain him in his daring effort : 
first, he uses a meter singularly pliable and resonant; and 
secondly, he leaves his theme at will, and weaves into his 
poem a hundred exquisite suggestions of natural beauty 
and imaginative vision, so that while his theme is mourn- 
ful his poem is often ecstatic, and monotony is avoided by 
richness of fancy and variety of theme. In what respects 
does "In Memoriam" differ from these great masterpieces? 
Wherein does its distinctive charm and greatness lie.'' 

In the first place, it differs entirely in metrical form and 
arrangement. Properly speaking, it is hymnal in form. 
Some of its stanzas are admirably suited for Christian 
worship, and no doubt will appear, with slight alterations, 
in the hymnal collections of the future. In this respect it 
is distinctively English, and appeals strongly to English 
tastes. But what is there that could be conceived as 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 123 

more monotonous than a hymn of a thousand stanzas? 
The hymnal form may be excellently suited for elegy, but 
how is it possible to combine a form in itself monotonous 
with a theme whose chief peril is monotony, without pro- 
ducing a poem which would be insufferably dull and tedi- 
ous? That was the problem Tennyson had to solve, and 
he solved it in two ways. Instead of the ordinary hymnal 
quatrain, he adopted a form, not unknown indeed in Eng- 
lish literature, but virtually new to modern readers, in 
which the first and last and the two middle lines of the 
verses rhyme. Any one who will take the trouble to com- 
pare these forms will at once see how greatly Tennyson's 
variation gains in modulation and flexibility. He had 
already attempted it in one of his earlier poems, "Love 
thou thy land with love far brought," and had no doubt 
been struck with its power of musical expression. If, as 
we surmise, "In Memoriam" grew slowly from certain 
fragmentary stanzas, thrown off in the first agony of grief, 
no doubt that was the metrical form in which they were 
written. A form more perfect for elegiac poetry could 
not be conceived; but how could it be applied to an elabo- 
rate poem of many hundreds of lines? This Tennyson 
answered by dividing his poem into short sections, each 
one complete in itself, and expressing some particular 
thought or sentiment. It is to this division of the poem, 
in part at least, that much of its popularity must be attrib- 
uted. I have already quoted the saying of an acute critic, 
that the reason why people read "Paradise Lost" is that 
it is arranged in sections, and can therefore be put down 
and resumed at will. This is eminently true of "In Me- 
moriam." It is a brilliant constellation of short poems, 
held together in rhythmic order by one great sustaining 



124 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

sentiment. We can open it where we will, read as much 
as we wish, and put it down again, without any perplexing- 
sense of having missed the poet's meaning or destroyed his 
clue of thought. Of course this is not the student's 
method of reading "In Memoriam," but it is a method 
often forced upon busy men by the necessities of their 
position; and the fact that "In Memoriam" is as truly a 
cluster of small poems as a great poem in itself has no 
doubt helped its popularity, and has fully justified the 
artistic instinct which suggested its division into sections. 
Another point worthy of special remark is, that not 
merely in form, but in all its coloring, "In Memoriam" 
is a distinctively English poem. Milton's noble elegy we 
have already spoken of as a fragment of the antique, and 
its whole conception and spirit is severely classic. Shelley 
goes to the same source to find inspiration for his elegy 
on Keats. Save the passages which directly touch on the 
unhappy fate of Keats, there is nothing in the poem which 
is distinctively English. Its allusions are classic; its sky 
is the sky of Italy; its scenery has a gorgeousness of color 
and a pomp unknown in the gray latitudes of the north. 
Over the dead body of Keats, Shelley builds a glorious 
and fantastic tomb — a sepulcher of foreign splendors, and 
the earth that holds him in her bosom is a warmer and 
more glorious earth than that land of somber skies and 
gray seas where his genius was suffered to blossom 
and decay unheeded. Gray, indeed, is English; Arnold 
is English, but with the trace of Greek culture always per- 
ceptible; but Milton and Shelley both go boldly to the 
classics for their inspiration, and have written elegies 
which are English in name indeed, but classical in spirit and 
design. It is the charm of "In Memoriam" that it is 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 125 

steeped in English thought and spirit. Its sights and 
sounds are the famihar sights and sounds of rural life in 
England. It is England, and no other land, that is de- 
scribed in lines like these: 

Now fades the last long streak of snow, 
Now burgeons every maze of quick 
About the flowery squares, and thick 

By ashen roots the violets grow. 

Now rings the woodland loud and long, 
The distance takes a lovelier hue, 
And, drowned in yonder living blue, 

The lark becomes a sightless song. 

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea, 
The flocks are whiter down the vale, 
And milkier every milky sail, 

On winding stream or distant sea; 

Where now the sea-mew pipes, or dives 
In yonder gleaming green, and fly 
The happy birds, that change their sky 

To build and brood. 

All the color of the pictures drawn from life and nature is 
English, and can be mistaken for no other. It is the 
Christmas eve we all have known which he thus describes 

for us: 

The time draws near the birth of Christ; 
The moon is hid, the rright is still: 
A single church below the hill 
Is pealing, folded in the mist. 

It is the English summer, whose mellow eventides we all 
have rejoiced in, when "returning from afar," 

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, 
We heard behind the woodbine veil 
The milk that bubbled in the pail. 

And buzzings of the honeyed hours. 



126 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Nowhere in Tennyson's works will there be found 
more perfect pictures of English scenery and seasons exe- 
cuted with more artistic delicacy and skill than in "In 
Memoriam." They are all exquisitely finished, with 
something of the labored patience of pictures on ivory or 
porcelain, and each is perfect in its way. The effects are 
often gained in single phrases, so happy, so luminous, so 
exact, that we feel it is impossible to surpass them. This, 
at least, is one of the qualities which have made "In 
Memoriam" famous. It is not merely a noble threnody 
upon a dead Englishman, but it is one of the most dis- 
tinctively English poems in the language, expressing uni- 
versal sentiments indeed, but with a perpetual reference to 
national scenery, customs, and life. 

One other point should not be overlooked in estimating 
such a poem as "In Memoriam." To its many other 
great qualities, it adds one of the rarest of all — it is the 
most perfect expression we have of the spirit of the age. 
It is a poem of the century; indeed, we may say, the 
poem of the century. It sums up as no other work of our 
time has done the characteristic intellectual and religious 
movements of the Victorian epoch. Nowhere has Tenny- 
son borrowed so largely from modern science as here. 
The well-known lines. 

Break thou deep vase of chilling tears 
That grief hath shaken into frost, 

afford an excellent specimen of these obligations; the 
metaphor is very beautiful, but it cannot be understood 
without a knowledge of elementary chemistry. At first 
this was esteemed a startling innovation, and was used 
against him as a reproach, but if the great poet is he who 



Tennyson's " In Memoriam" 127 

concentrates in his poetry the spirit of his time, Tennyson 
was bound to take account of the scientific tendency, 
which is one of the most marked features of the century. 
But he has done more than this. He has stated, not 
merely scientific arguments and facts, but also the religious 
doubts, the perplexities, the philosophic difficulties of the 
day, with equal skill and force. He has perceived the 
intellectual and religious drift of his age with unerring 
accuracy. He himself has passed through its various 
stages of doubtful illumination, of dark misgiving, of 
agonizing search for light, and lastly of clear and even 
triumphant faith. Like another poet of our time, Arthur 
Hugh Clough, Tennyson has known what it is 

To finger idly some old Gordian knot, 

Unskilled to sunder and too weak to cleave, 
And with much toil attain to half-believe. 

But he has done what Clough could not do, he has cut the 
Gordian knot, and found "a surer faith his own." The 
process by which he has attained this victory we shall see 
in the analysis of "In Memoriam." In the mean time, it 
is sufficient to observe that the hold which this poem has 
taken on the minds of men must be attributed not only to 
its literary genius, but to its prophetic qualities. Not 
merely is it original in metrical design, and thoroughly 
English in color, but it is also an interpretation of the 
deepest religious yearnings and philosophic problems of 
our time, and as such has become the indispensable com- 
panion of all who share, and seek to understand or to 
direct, the intellectual life of the century. 

A great poem should interpret itself, and, in the larger 
sense, "In Memoriam" needs no comment or elucidation. 
But there is another sense in which elucidation is needed 



128 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and cannot but be useful. Because the "In Memoriam" 
is, as we have seen, not merely a great poem in itself, but 
really a series of short poems held together by a common 
sentiment, it is not always easy to perceive the thread of 
thought that binds each to each. The transitions of 
thought and theme are always subtle, and often sudden. 
The various suggestions of loss crowd thickly on the mind 
of the poet, and it is sometimes difficult to perceive the 
link which connects them into an organic whole. It may 
be well, therefore, to attempt, not an elaborate analysis, 
for that has been ably done by others, but a sort of indi- 
catory comment whereby we may perceive the course and 
current of the poem. 

The opening poem of the series is an after-thought, 
and sums up much that is said hereafter in detail. It is 
a final confession of religious faith, "believing where we 
cannot prove, ' ' in which Tennyson craves forgiveness for 
"the wild and wandering cries" of the poem, which he 
terms "confusions of a wasted youth." The poem proper 
then begins. From i. to v. we have a statement of those 
common states of mind which attend all great bereave- 
ments. There is a sacredness in loss (v.) which almost 
makes it a sacrilege to embalm the sorrow of the heart in 
words, and yet there is a use in measured language, for at 
least the labor of literary production numbs the pain. 
Then follows (vi.) a beautiful and pathetic vision of what 
loss means to others besides himself. Such a sorrow as 
his is not peculiar: at the moment while the father pledges 
his gallant son, he is shot upon the battle-field, and while 
the mother prays for her sailor-lad, his 

Heavy-shotted hammock-shroud 
Drops in his vast and wandering grave. 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 129 

Memory wakens (vii.-viii.), and then Fancy (ix.-x.); the 
one recaUing ended joys of fellowship, the other picturing 
the ship that bears homeward the dead body of his friend; 
and fancy suggests that it at least is something to be 
spared an ocean burial, and to sleep in Enghsh earth, that 

From his ashes may be made 

The violet of his native land. (xviii.) 

Nature is calm (xi. ), but if the poet has any calm it is a 
calm despair. Yet while he pictures the processes of 
death, he marks it as curious that it is almost impossible 
to believe his friend is dead. If again they struck hand in 
hand, he would not feel it strange (xiv.), for death seems 
unimaginable. Then again the light fades, and he pic- 
tures the linal obsequies and place of rest (xix.). Pain 
may be meant to produce in him the firmer mind (xviii.). 
Perhaps some will say that this brooding over grief is 
unmanly, the pastime of the egotist, the vain torture of a 
morbid mind; to which he can only reply they know 
neither him nor his frieiid. 

1 do but sing because 1 must, 

And pipe but as the linnets sing. (xxi.) 

Again he recalls lost days, and how on the "fifth autum- 
nal slope" of those brief ended years. Death met and 
parted them (xxii.). Let those mock who will. He has 
no envy of those more callous of heart than he, who have 
never known the joy of a perfect love and therefore 
cannot understand what its loss may mean. A man's 
capacity of agony is his capacity of rapture: 

I hold it true, whate'er befall, 
1 feel it, when I sorrow most; 
'Tis better to have loved and lost 

Than never to have loved at all. (xxvii.) 



ijo Literary Leaders of Modern England 

The time of happy family gatherings draws near, and 

Christmas bells from hill to hill 
Answer each other in the mist. 

To him it is a sad time of forced mirth and empty joy. 
But there is something in the very season that suggests 
nobler thoughts: 

Our voices took a higher range; 

Once more we sang: "They do not die 

Nor lose their mortal sympathy, 
Nor change to us, although they change." (xxx.) 

That, at least, is the promise of faith, and with a cry to 
the Divine Father, who lit "the light that shone when Hope 
was born," the first great halting-place in the poem is 
reached. 

In the next section of the poem (xxxi.) a new line of 
thought begins with the touching picture of Lazarus re- 
deemed from the grave's dishonors, and seated once more 
among the familiar faces of Bethany. During those four 
days of sojourn in the realm of death, did Lazarus yearn 
for human love, or miss it.'' Did he retain a conscious 
identity, and know where and what he was? If he had 
willed, surely he could have solved all the deep mystery of 
death for us. But if such questions were proposed to him, 
"there lives no record of reply," or if he answered them, 
"something sealed the lips of that evangelist," and the 
world will never know the secrets of the prison-house. 
At this point Tennyson begins to state and combat the 
doubts that perplex him. Yet he half hesitates to do so. 
Simple faith is so beautiful and rare, that he may well ask 
himself what right he has to disturb its serenity with his 
uneasy questionings. Let any who, after toil and storm. 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 131 

think that they have reached a higher freedom of truth, 
be careful how they disturb the faith of simple souls, who 
have nothing but their faith to sustain them, and whose 
"hands are quicker unto good" than ours (xxxii.). Yet 
we cannot help asking, "Is man immortal?" If he is 

not, then 

Earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is. 

The thought of God is lost, and the best fate were to drop 

Head-foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease. (xxxiv.) 

In the hour of such awful questionings the heart instinc- 
tively turns to Christ, who wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds 
More strong than all poetic thought. (xxxvi.) 

Doubt and hope now alternate like shadow and light in the 
poet's mind. When he sees the sun sink on the wide 
moor, a spectral doubt makes him cold with the sugges- 
tion that so his friend's life has sunk out of sight, and he 
will see his "mate no more" (xli. ). Perhaps his friend is 
as the maiden who has entered on the new toils of wedded 
days, and is content to forsake the home of childhood: 
yet even she returns sometimes to 

Bring her babe, and make her boast, 
Till even those who missed her most 
Shall coimt new things as dear as old. (xl.) 

"How fares it with the happy dead.*"' (xliv.) May 
not death be in itself a new birth, the entrance upon fuller 
life.'' (xlv.) Only it were hard to accept the suggestion 



132 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

literally, for that would mean forgetfulness of that which 
preceded the entrance on eternal life. "In that deep 
dawn behind the tomb" will not "the eternal landscape of 
the past" be clear "from marge to marge"? (xlvi.) With 
those who speak of death as reabsorption into the univer- 
sal soul he has no sympathy. It is "faith as vague as all 
unsweet"; it means destruction of identity, and his hope 
about his dead friend is that he 

Shall know him when we meet, 
And we shall sit in endless feast, 
Enjoying each the other's good. (xlvii.) 

With the glow of that thought burning in him he calls 
upon the dead ever to be near him — when the light is low, 
when the heart is sick, when the pangs of pain conquer 
trust, when the folly and emptiness of human life appal 
him and finally, when he fades away on that low dark 
verge of life which is 

The twilight of eternal day. (1.) 

Yet even this wish he is keen to question a moment later; 
do we really desire our dead to be near us in spirit, and is 
there no baseness we would hide from their purged and 
piercing vision.'* (li.) In fact, his soul has become so sick 
with sorrow that he now only suggests hopes to himself, 
that he may fight against them. He philosophizes on his 
own errors of conduct, but rebukes his conclusions with 
the fear that he may push Philosophy beyond her mark, 
and make her "Procuress to the lords of hell!" (liv.) Yet 
in the moment of the uttermost darkness, full of distemper 
and despair, he breaks forth into one of the noblest con- 
fessions of faith. 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 133 

That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 

When God hath made the pile complete. (liv.) 

It is true that Nature teaches no such doctrine; she is 
careless of the single type, and cries, 

A thousand types are gone; 

I care for nothing, all shall go. (Iv.-vi.) 

Yet will he stretch lame hands of faith, and "faintly trust 
the larger hope." Nay, it seems a sin against the dead 
to doubt that it is forever and forever well with them 
(Ivii.). The lost Arthur is in a "second state sublime"; 
and he has carried human love with him there. Will he 
still love his friend on earth? (Ixi.) Will he not still love 
the earth and earthly ways.'' It is a question Emily Bronte 
answered in her daring picture of a spirit in heaven sighing 
unceasingly for the purple moors she loved below, until 
the angels in anger cast her out, and she wakes, sobbing 
for joy, on the wild heather, with a skylark singing over 
her. Tennyson pictures the great statesman who still 
yearns for the village green of childhood, and consoles 
himself that love cannot be lost: 

Since we deserved the name of friends, 

And thine effect so lives in me, 

A part of mine may live in thee, 
And move thee on to nobler deeds. (Ixiv.-v.) 

He dreamed there would be spring no more, but now he 
perceives that his life begins to quicken again (Ixix.). 

So many worlds, so much to do, 

So little done, such things to be, (Ixxiii.) 

is his reflection on the premature ending of his friend's 
life, but it also marks an awakening of purpose in his own. 



134 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Here again, upon the' verge of another Christmas, the 
poem seems to pause with the personal reflections of the 
seventy-seventh section, on the possibility that what he 
has written of his friend may never find readers, nor touch 
any heart but his own. There is a virility and spirit in 
this section which marks the movement of a healthier 
mind. That he can begin to think about the publication 
of his own verses is significant of the rekindling of human 
ambition in him, and is the token that the lethargy of grief 
is broken. He has not recovered his strength yet; but 
the crisis of the disease is over. 

From this point the poem moves in a clearer and less 
grief-laden atmosphere; the assurance of faith becomes 
stronger, and a note of triumph breathes in the music, 
gradually heightening and deepening to its majestic close. 
He can bear now to pass in review the lost possibilities of 
earthly felicity which were in his friend (Ixxxiv.), because 
he has learned to believe that a diviner felicity is his. He 
holds sacred "commune with the dead," and asks, 

How is it? Canst thou feel for me 

Some painless sympathy with pain? (Ixxxv.) 

He gives us a portrait of his friend; he pictures him eager 
in debate, a master bowman cleaving the center of the 
profoundest thought, quick and impassioned in oratory, 

And over those ethereal eyes 

The bar of Michael Angelo; (Ixxxvii.) 

that is, the deep furrow between the eyebrows,* which 
was indicative of individuality in the great Italian artist. 
He recollects how he left "the dusty purlieus of the law," 

* This is a disputed point. According to Dr. Gatty the reference is the 
straightness and prominence of Hallam's forehead, in which it resembled 
Michael Angelo's. 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 135 

and joined in simple rural sports with boyish glee ( Ixxxix. ) ; 
and how they talked together, and in prolonged and eager 

converse 

Discussed the books to love or hate, 
Or touched the changes of the state, 
Or threaded some Socratic dream. 

This portraiture of Arthur Hallam is completed later on, 
in the striking stanza of the hundred and eleventh section, 
when Tennyson exclaims: 

And thus he bore without abuse 
The grand old name of gentleman, 
Defamed by every charlatan, 

And soiled with all ignoble use. 

Again he implores his presence, and he will have no fear; 
for whereas he once thought of him as lost forever, now 
he feels his presence, "Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost," 
and actually believes that in dream or vision his friend 
does visit him — 

So word by word, and line by line, 
The dead man touched me from the past, 
And all at once it seemed at last 

The living soul was flashed on mine. (xci.-v.) 

It is mind breathing on mind from the past; he feels that 
whatever is lost, tJiat survives, and is with him alway. 
It is true that his friend has doubted, but it was honest 
doubt, which he defends in the famous lines: 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, 

Believe me, than in half the creeds. (xcvi.) 

He draws a lovely picture of a wife who lives with a hus- 
band whose intellectual life is beyond her apprehension, 
but who can say at least, as he has learned to say, "I 



136 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

cannot understand; I love" (xcvii.). It is the only out- 
come from bewilderment; he will follow, not the reason, 
but the heart; a truth stated with yet greater force and 
fullness in section cxxiv. : 

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, " Believe no more," 

A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part, 

And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up, and answered, " I have felt." 

He recalls how he and his friend traveled together in 
unforgotten summer days, and that leads to a series of 
those beautiful cabinet pictures of scenery which lend so 
great a charm to the poem ( xcviii.-ci.). He relates how 
he has dreamed, and saw in dreams the glory of his friend; 
how "thrice as large as man he bent to greet us"^ — a 
symbol of the larger manhood which he has inherited; and 
how he stood upon the deck of some great ship with shin- 
ing sides, that sailed o'er floods of "grander space" than 
any earthly — a pathetic reference to the ship that bore his 
dead body home to England, and again a symbol of that 
voyage of life on which his spirit now passes through an 
ever-broadening glory (ciii.). Then again the Christmas 
comes: charged still with too great memories of sorrow to 
allow the dance and wassail-song, but yet bringing a genial 
change in him, for he has abandoned wayward grief, and 
"broke the bond of dying use" (cv.). This Christmas is 
spent in "the stranger's land," away from home, and the 
bells are not the bells he knows. The Christmas bells 
peal "folded in the mist" as before; but when the New 
Year is near its dawning there is a new music in the bells, 
a hope and triumph in their chime, which sets his heart 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 137 

vibrating witli a new and wholesome vigor, and he breaks 
out into that memorable apostrophe: 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 
The flying cloud, the frosty light, 
The year is dying in the night. 

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. (cvi.) 

The happy clangor of the New Year bells celebrates 
his final emancipation from the perplexities of doubt, his 
final recovery of healthful life, the sanctification of his 
sorrow, the triumph of his faith. It is the anniversary of 
Arthur Hallam's birth, the bitter February weather, which 
"admits not flowers or leaves to deck the banquet," yet 
the day shall be kept with festal cheer — 

With books and music; surely we 
Will drink to him, whate'er he be. 
And sing the songs he loved to hear. (cvii.) 

He has soared into the inystic heights of perplexed specu- 
lation, only to find his "own phantom singing hymns"; 
henceforth, he says: 

1 will not shut me from my kind; 

And lest I stiffen into stone, 

I will not eat my heart alone, 
Nor feed with sighs a passing wind. (cviii.) 

Science, which teaches him how the world and human 
life have grown out of the fierce shocks of age-long dis- 
cipline, the cleansing fire and cyclic storm, may also teach 
him that sorrow is to man a sacred discipline, and that 
fear, and weeping, and the shocks of doom do but batter 
him to shape and use (cxviii.). Natural science can tell us 
much, but not all; we are not "magnetic mockeries," nor 
"cunning casts in clay." There is a spiritual science also 
which the wise man seeks to learn, and which unfolds a 



138 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

truer map of the mysterious nature of man (cxx. ). It is 
the reality of spiritual existence that his sorrow has re- 
vealed to him. Love is immortality, and through his love 
he has already entered on eternal life. The knowledge 
that his lost friend is really alive for evermore; that death 
for him has been simply emancipation and enfranchisement; 
that all which he loved in him not merely survives, but is 
perfected in excellence, freed from all human blemish or 
limitation — this fills him with an almost ecstatic joy. In 
the early morning, when the city is asleep, he again stands 
before those dark doors in Wimpole Street, but it is no 
longer with agonized upbraidings of fate. The calmness 
and hope of morning are with him, as they were with that 
forlorn woman who long since sought her Master, when it 
was yet early, in an Eastern garden, and found, not a 
corpse within the tomb, but a shining Figure walking in 
the dewy freshness of the day, and he says: 

And in my thoughts, with scarce a sigh, 

I take the pressure of thy hand. (cxix.) 

It is more than resignation, it is more than hope. It is 
the voice of living certainty, of an entire and undivided 
triumph, which lifts itself above the dark confusions of 
the past and sings — 

Far oft" thou art, but ever nigh, 
I have thee still and I rejoice; 
I prosper, circled with thy voice, 
I shall not lose thee tho' I die. (cxxx.) 

The long anguish has done its work in the purification of 
the soul and the strengthening of the faith; all the bitter 
sounds of wailing and distress die away, and it is with a 
perfect hallelujah chorus of glory in the highest, and 
peace upon earth, that the poem ends. 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 139 

There is, however, annexed to it one other section, and 
not the least lovely — the epithalanrium on his sister's mar- 
riage. We learn that this marriage took place "some 
thrice three years" after Arthur Hallam's death, but 
whether the bride was the sister Hallam hoped to marry 
we have no means of knowing. This epithalamium is one 
of those happy after-touches in which Tennyson displays 
so perfectly his artistic skill. It is suggestive of how life 
goes on, and must go on, in spite of the gaps made in our 
ranks by death; and "the clash and clang" of the wed- 
ding bells, carried on the warm breeze, is a noble contrast 
to that mournful pealing of bells through the mist which 
is heard so often in the earlier stages of the poem. The 
winter is over and gone, the time of the singing of birds 
is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. 
And now, whether life bring joy or sorrow, funeral chimes 
or marriage bells, the poet has an all-sustaining and puri- 
fying faith in God — 

That God, which ever Hves and loves, 

One God, one law, one element, 

And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves. 

That "one far-off divine event" can be no other than the 
perfecting of love in human life, the complete recognition 
by every living soul of the love of God, and the final vin- 
dication of that perfect divine love in all its varied deal- 
ings with men, in things past, in things present, and in 
things that are to come. This is the vaguely sketched 
yet noble vision, which crowns with spiritual glory the 
completion of his thought and labor. He has led us through 
the darkest valleys of Apollyon, but we reach with him the 
Beulah land at last. We hear the trumpets pealing on 



140 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

the other side, and behold it is morning! Fair and sweet 
the hght shines, and heavenly voices tell us we shall walk 
in night no more. It is morning — the morning of a deep 
and clear-eyed faith; and doubt and sorrow, fear and 
pain, are past forever. They are not forgotten indeed; 
but we see them now only as distant clouds touched with 
glories of celestial color, lying far and faint behind us on 
the radiant horizon, transfigured and transformed by the 
alchemy of God. The phantoms of the night are slain, 
the anguish of the night is ended; the true light shineth 
with healing in its wings, and the soul rejoices. It may 
well rejoice with joy unspeakable, for 

Out of the shadow of night 
The world rolls into light, 
It is daybreak everywhere. 

We here conclude our study of Tennyson. What his 
ultimate position in the ranks of fame may be it is impos- 
sible to decide. We are yet too fully under his immediate 
influence for our discernment to be just or our judgment 
to be wise. That he is among the few great creative 
poets of humanity no one will assert; that he is never- 
theless a poet of great and varied excellence none will 
deny. He has been compared with Milton, and has been 
set so high above Wordsworth that one of his critics has 
ventured to say that in the future, when men call the roll 
of poets, "they will begin with Shakespeare and Milton — 
and who shall have the third place if it be not Tennyson.'*" 
But Emerson, whose judgment is worthy of general defer- 
ence, has said that Wordsworth is the poet of modern 
England, and that "other writers have to affect what to 
him is natural." And that pregnant saying illumines at 



Tennyson's "In Memoriam" 141 

once the whole question, laying bare at one stroke the 
secret of Wodsworth's supremacy and of Tennyson's 
deficiency. We cannot but feel that he lacks the massive 
ease of Wordsworth and the deep interior strength of 
Milton. If we still hesitate to grant him equality with the 
foremost poets of his own century, it is for the sound 
reason that while in Tennyson artistic culture has never 
been surpassed, yet the original poetic impulse is weaker 
in him than in either of these great poets. But happily 
it is not necessary for us to determine the rank, before we 
can discern the genius, of our masters; it is enough for us 
to receive with thankfulness and admiration the writings 
of a great poet, who for sixty years has fed the mind of 
England with visions of truth and beauty, and who, 
through all that length of various years, has never ceased 
to be a source of inspiration and delight to that diffused 
and dominant race who 

Speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What experience in Tennyson's life led to the writing 
of " In Memoriam "? 

2. How is it probable that the idea of the poem developed 
in Tennyson's mind? 

3. Compare the famous elegiac poems which have ap- 
peared in English literature? 

4. What external qualities of " In Memoriam " have helped 
its popularity? 

5. Give illustrations of some peculiarly English character- 
istics of the poem. 

6. How does it reflect the spirit of the nineteenth century? 

7. Show how the thought of the poem develops up to 
Section xxxi. 



142 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

8. Show the changes in the quality of the poet's thought 
in the next section. 

9. How does the poem proceed to a triumphant conclusion? 

10. Describe the epithalamium. 

11. What comparisons have been made between Tenny- 
son and the other great poets of the century? 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Tefinyson : His A rt and Relation to Modern Life. Stopford 
A. Brooke. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. Henry Van Dyke. 

Tennyson' s hi Me//ioria/n, Its Purpose and Its Structure. 
John F. Genung. 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Brozuning. Anne Thack- 
eray Ritchie. 

The Victorian Poets. Edmund Clarence Stedman. 

Poets and Problems. George Willis Cooke. 

Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates. 
Frederic Harrison. 



CHAPTER XIII 

ROBERT BROWNING 

[Born at Camberwell, London, May 7, 1812. " Pauline " pub- 
lished 1832. Married Elizabeth Barrett September 12, 
1846. "The Ring and the Book " published 1868. " Aso- 
lando," his last volume, 1889. Died in Venice, December 
12, 1889. Buried in Westminster Abbey, December 31, 
1889.] 

The two greatest figures in the world of modern poetry 
are Tennyson and Browning. To each has been accorded 
old age; both have been keenly ahve to the intellectual 
and social movements of their time, and have endeavored 
to reflect them. Each also has been an observant student 
of life, as all true poets must be, and each has constructed 
a huge gallery of human portraits, representing many 
types, and arranged with artistic instinct and consummate 
skill. But while Tennyson has proved himself the greater 
artist. Browning has proved himself the greater mind. 
He has brought to the work of the poet a keen and subtle 
intellect, a penetrating insight, the experience of a citizen 
of the world, and in all things the original force of a 
powerful individuality. The result of his artistic deficiency 
is, that he has entirely failed to obtain popularity. He has 
not known how to deliver his message to the popular ear, 
and it may be doubted if he has ever cared to try. With 
a touch of justifiable scorn, he has declared that he never 
intended his poetry to be a substitute for a cigar or a game 

143 



144 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

of dominoes to an idle man. The grace and music of 
Tennyson's verse have compelled delight, but in Browning 
there is no attempt at verbal music. It is with him an 
unstudied, perhaps an uncoveted, art. When David 
sought to express the consummate union of the opposite 
qualities which constitute perfection, he said, "Strength 
and beauty are in His sanctuary." In Browning we have 
the strength, in Tennyson the beauty. And the result of 
this artistic deficiency, this inability to clothe his thoughts 
in forms of grace, is, that Browning has failed in any large 
degree to charm the ear of that wide public who care less 
for the thought that is uttered than for the manner of its 
utterance. 

It is, however, necessary to remember another fact 
about Browning's poetry; viz., that to the first minds of 
the age, the men who lead and govern the world of 
thought, Browning has been and is a potent and inspiring- 
force. He has disseminated ideas, he has pervaded the 
literature of his time with his influence. He has found 
an audience, few but fitting, and to them has addressed 
himself, knowing that through them he could effectually 
reach the world at large. The test of popularity is at all 
times an imperfect test, and in Browning's case is wholly 
inadequate and unsatisfactory as an index of his true posi- 
tion in the literature of his day. The influence of a poet 
is often out of all proportion to his popularity, and is by 
no means to be measured by the number of his readers, 
or the poverty or copiousness of public praise. If mere 
popularity were to become the solitary test of influence, 
we should have to rank Longfellow above Dante, and 
Martin Tupper above Tennyson. But while popularity is 
in itself a testimony to the possession of certain service- 



Robert Browning 145 

able qualities, or a certain happy combination of qualities, 
it fails wholly as a just measurement of the real formative 
force which a writer may be able to exercise upon his 
time, and still more hopelessly as an indication of the posi- 
tion such a writer may take up in the unknown judgments 
of posterity. A man may catch the ear of the public, 
and win its empty plaudits, without touching in more than 
an infinitesimal degree the public conscience or the public 
thought. 

The deeper and diviner waves of intellectual life indeed 
have more often than not owed their origin to men who 
have quarreled with their age, and received from their 
contemporaries little but the thorn-crown of derision and 
the sponge of gall and vinegar — men wandering in the 
bitterness of exile like Dante, or starving in the scholar's 
garret like Spinoza. Most truly great writers, to whom 
has been committed the creative genius which opens new 
wells of thought and new methods of utterance, have had 
need to steel themselves against the indifference of their 
time, and to learn how to say: "None of these things 
move me." They have appealed from the contemptuous 
ignorance of their contemporaries to the certain praises of 
posterity, and not in vain. Where such men find readers 
they make disciples, and each heart upon which the fire 
of their genius falls becomes consecrated to their service. 
Theirs it is to found a secular apostolate, a school of 
prophets united by a common faith, and pledged by the 
sacredness of an intense conviction to urge on the teach- 
ing of the new doctrine and the new name, till the world 
acknowledges the claim and gives adhesion to the master 
whom they love and reverence. 

Let us grant, then, that we have in Robert Browning 



146 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

undoubtedly a great poet, but also an undoubtedly unpopu- 
lar poet. With the exception of the "Ride from Ghent 
to Aix," the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," and the tender 
and pathetic "Evelyn Hope," few or none of his poems 
have won the ear of the general public. Yet he has pro- 
duced no fewer than twenty-four volumes, the latest of 
which was not long since everywhere discussed. No 
writer of our time has manifested greater fecundity of 
genius, versatility of style, or capacity of industry. Few 
writers have ever had a firmer faith in themselves, and 
have trusted more fully to the secure awards of time. Now 
that the poetry of Browning has become a cult, his less 
known works have probably found readers; but at the 
time of their publication, few but the reviewers had the 
courage to read them. There is a story told of Leigh 
Hunt's having "Sordello" sent him for review at a time 
when he was in weak health and low spirits. After an 
hour's fruitless effort, he flung the book aside, crying: 
"My brain is failing! I must be mad! I have not under- 
stood a word." His wife then took the book up, and it 
was agreed that upon the test of her ability to understand 
it the question of her husband's sanity must turn. She at 
length flung it down, saying: "My dear, don't be alarmed. 
You're not mad; but the man who wrote it is!" Many 
persons have closed "Sordello" with the same angry com- 
ment, and there are isolated passages in Browning more 
difficult than anything in "Sordello." How is it, then, 
that the man whose mastery of humor is so finely dis- 
played in the "Pied Piper," whose pathos and power 
of narrative have such splendid attestations as "Evelyn 
Hope" and the "Ride from Ghent to Aix," who can 
write with such terseness, simplicity, and vigor as these 



Robert Browning 147 

poems display, is, nevertheless, to the bulk of English 
readers a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence? 

The answer to this question is not difficult. Let it at 
once be granted that Robert Browning can write as clearly 
as any English poet when he likes, for he has done it. 
Open Browning at random, and it will be hard if, in half 
an hour, you do not come upon a score of noble thoughts, 
admirably expressed in clear-ringing English, with delicate 
attention to phrase and perfect adherence to the laws of 
construction. Yet it must be owned that in the same half- 
hour it is quite possible to alight on passages where the 
nominative has lost its verb beyond hope of recovery, and 
phrases seem to have been jerked out haphazard, in a sort 
of volcanic eruption of thought and temper. What is the 
underlying cause of these defects of style.'' 

There are two main causes. The first springs from 
Browning's theory of poetry. Browning's theory of 
poetry is a serious one. Like all truly great artists, he 
has uniformly recognized the dignity and responsibility of 
art. With him poetry is not the manufacture of a melo- 
dious jingle, nor the elaboration of pretty conceits: it is 
as serious as life, and is to be approached with reverent 
and righteous purpose. It is, moreover, the noblest of 
all intellectual labors, and should therefore minister to the 
intellect not less than to the emotion. Into his poetry 
Browning has put his subtlest and deepest thought, and he 
uniformly puts a higher value on the thought than the 
method or manner of its expression. In "Pauline," his 
earliest poem, published in 1832, he says, with a true 
forecast of his own powers and limitations: 

So will I sing on, fast as fancies come; 
Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints. 



148 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

With him the sense is more than the sound, the substance 
is more than the form, the moral significance is more than 
the rhetorical adornment. He has something to say, 
something of infinite moment and solemn import, and he 
is comparatively careless of how he says it. He is the 
Carlyle of poetry: the message is everything, the verbal 
vesture nothing. It is in this respect that Browning's 
divergence from all other modern poets is greatest. He is 
not indifferent to the art and music of words, but he habitu- 
ally treats them as of secondary importance. Naturally, 
the growth of this temper has led Browning into extrava- 
gances of style, as it did Carlyle; many a fine thought is 
hopelessly embedded in insufficient and faulty phrases, 
and therefore, to the mass of readers who do not approach 
poetry with the patient spirit of scientific research, is 
hopelessly lost. 

The second cause of the occasional obscurity of 
Browning's poetry is found in the condensation of his 
style. When "Paracelsus" was published it was declared 
unintelligible, and John Sterling, one of the acutest critics 
of his day, accused it of "verbosity." This saying of 
Sterling's was reported to Browning by Miss Caroline 
Fox, who went on to ask: "Doth he know that Words- 
worth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of 
a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet.-"' 

This criticism filled Browning with a dread of diffuse- 
ness, and henceforth he set himself never to use two words 
where one would do. The result of this resolve is, that 
often he does not use words enough to express his mean- 
ing. He uses one word, and expects his reader to supply 
two. It is this which makes "Sordello" the puzzle it is. 
It is a vast web of words, in which the filaments are 



Robert Browning 149 

dropped, confused, tangled, like the crumpled gossamer 
of a spider's web hastily detached and more than half- 
ruined by the touch of carelessness. 

There are beautiful thoughts and passages in "Sor- 
dello, " but they savor so much of bookishness, and 
demand so much antiquarian knowledge in the reader, that 
few are likely to disinter and appreciate them. For 
instance, take this passage from Book the Third: "Fac- 
titious humors" fall from Sordello, and turn him pure 

As some forgotten vest 
Woven of painted byssus, silkiest, 
Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip, 
Left welter where a trireme let it slip 
r the sea and vexed a satrap: so the stain 
O' the world forsakes Sordello: how the tinct 
Loosening escapes, cloud after cloud. 

Now, what is the picture painted here.' Analyze it, and 
this is the result: An eastern satrap, sailing upon a galley 
or trireme, wears a vest of byssus, dyed with Tyrian 
purple. He lets it fall overboard, and as he looks down 
through the clear sea sees the purple dye escaping and 
clouding the water. So Sordello is cleansed from the 
stain of the world. It is a very beautiful illustration; but 
its beauty is not perceived till we recollect that purple is 
taken from the tuft of the "whelk's pearl-sheeted lip," 
and that a garment so dyed, if cast into the sea, throws 
off its color in tremulous clouds. Does any one see the 
meaning at first sight.' And how many might read it and 
never see any meaning in it at all? This is an example of 
Browning in his worst mood; and we cannot wonder, 
when we consider it, that simple-minded poets like Charles 
Mackay called him the "High Priest of the Unintelligible"; 



150 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

or that Browning societies have had to be invented to 
reduce his recondite fancies to lucidity. 

These, then, are the tw^o main sources of all that is 
obscure in Brov^^ning's writings. The very fact that for 
many years he was a solitary worker, writing almost for 
his own pleasure, naturally confirmed the defects of his 
style. The obscurity is never of the thought; that, in- 
deed, is so clear and luminous to him that he seems inca- 
pable of conceiving it as confused in the vision of his reader. 
The thought is clear as the sun; but the atmosphere of 
words through which we perceive it is murky, and the 
body of the thought looms through it dim and strange. 
And so Mr. Swinburne has spoken with equal felicity and 
truth of Browning's faculty of "decisive and incisive 
thought," and has said: "He is something too much the 
reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the 
ready readers of a ready writer." The case cannot be 
better put than in the words of one of his most earnest 
and intelligent students: "He has never ignored beauty, 
but he has neglected it in the desire for significance. He 
has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so in the 
striving after strength. He never intended to be obscure, 
but he has become so from the condensation of style which 
was the excess of significance and strength." This should 
constantly be remembered, if we are to approach Brown- 
ing's poetry with the intelligence which interprets and the 
sympathy which appreciates. 

Were Browning not a great poet, it would be difficult 
to forgive him such defects as these. We should be 
inclined to dismiss him with the brief aphorism of the 
Swedish poet, Tegner, who said: "The obscurely uttered 
is the obscurely thought." But Browning is one of the 



Robert Browning 151 

greatest of poets, and has so profoundly affected the 
thought of his time, that however the ordinary reader may 
be repelled by the grotesqueness of his style, it is emi- 
nently worth the while even of that distinguished indi- 
vidual to endeavor to understand him. We freely grant 
that poets should not need interpreters; but where there 
is something of infinite moment to be interpreted it is well 
to set aside fixed rules and habitual maxims. Genius is 
so rare a gift that we must take it on its own terms, and 
we cannot afford to quarrel with the conditions it may 
impose on us. It speaks its own language, and is indiffer- 
ent alike to the reproach or desire of those whom it ad- 
dresses. The only question for us is, whether it is worth 
our while to endeavor to penetrate the meaning and ascer- 
tain the teaching of any writer who, through natural limi- 
tations or willful indifference, renders the study of his 
.works difficult and perplexing. In the case of Browning, 
I reply that no more remunerative study can be found 
than in the careful reading of his works. He embodies 
some of the most curious and pervasive tendencies of nine- 
teenth-century literature, and in subsequent chapters I 
shall endeavor to show what Browning's teaching is, and 
to estimate his influence in literature. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What qualities of Browning's poetry are usually the first 
to make themselves felt? 

2. In what way has Browning's influence been felt most 
deeply? 

3. Why is it not safe to judge of a poet's influence by his 
popularity? 

4. What is frequently the common destiny of great thinkers? 



152 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

5. What poems of Robert Browning are best known to the 
general public? 

6. What story is told of "Sordello"? 

7. What is probably the chief cause of Browning's obscure 
style? 

8. Give another reason for this defect. 

9. Why is it worth while to study Browning in spite of his 
defects? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Life and Letters of Robert Brownittg. Mrs. Sutherland Orr. 

Robert Browning. William Sharp. (Great Writers Series.) 

Robert Browning, Personalia. Edmund Gosse. 

Lntrodtiction to the Sttidy of Brownijig' s Poetry. Hiram 
Corson. 

A Handbook to the IVorks of Robert Browning. Mrs. 
Sutherland Orr. 



CHAPTER XIV 
BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE 

One of the most interesting facts about Robert Brown- 
ing is, that he has no toucli of the recluse about him; he 
is the child of cities, not of solitudes. In the writings of 
Wordsworth and Tennyson, dissimilar as they are in many 
respects, there is this bond of likeness — they breathe the 
air and silence of seclusion. With the one it is the silence 
of the mountains, with the other the ordered calm of Eng- 
lish rural life. All that Wordsworth has written is steeped 
in the very spirit of solitude, and the mighty silence of the 
hills has lent a majesty to his conceptions — an atmosphere, 
as it were, of dignified simplicity. In Tennyson, also, one 
is always conscious of the presence of nature. The wind 
that blows across his page is full of the dewy freshness of 
green lawns and rustling trees. The city, with its moil 
and grime, its passionate intensity of life and action, is far 
away. He sees its distant lights flaring like a dusky 
dawn, but he has little care to penetrate its mysteries. 
And in most modern poets the same remoteness from the 
passionate stress of life is felt. What is true of Words- 
worth and Tennyson is equally true of Keats and Morris. 
The fundamental idea in each seems to be that the life of 
the recluse alone is favorable to poetry, and that the life 
of action in the great centers of civihzation is fatal to 
works of imagination. 

To this temper Browning furnishes a splendid excep- 
153 



1 54 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

tioii. Born a Londoner, and proud to own himself a citi- 
zen of the greatest city upon earth, it is with London, 
Florence, and Venice that his name is imperishably inter- 
woven; not the Lake district of Wordsworth, nor the 
Geneva of Byron, nor the Spezzia of Shelley. In conti- 
nental travel he is evidently more familiar with the book- 
stalls of Florence than the snow-solitudes of the high 
Alps. He was a familiar figure in society for many years. 
He does not shun the crowd: he seeks and loves it. The 
sense of numbers quickens his imagination. The great 
drama of human life absorbs him. The glimpses of pure 
nature he gives us are curiously few. He can describe a 
lunar rainbow, but he saw it not among the Alps, but 
from the dull greensward of a London common. Practi- 
cally he has little to say about nature as such. When he 
does describe any bit of scenery he does it with scientific 
accuracy. His pictures of Italy are full of the very spirit 
of Italian scenery, and have an almost photographic exac- 
titude. But they are the mere by-play of his mind. It is 
Itahan life which fascinates him, not Italian scenery. It 
f is li^ everywhere that moves him to utterance, -and in the 
crowd of men, and in the tangled motives of men, and the 
constant dramas and tragedies bred by the passions and 
instincts of the human heart. Browning has found the food 
upon which his genius has thriven. In this respect Brown- 
ing occupies an entirely unique position among modern 
poets. He concerns himself so little with the message 
of nature, and so much with the soul of man, that his 
whole poetry may be called the Poetry of the Soul: its 

Shifting fancies and celestial lights, 

With all its grand orchestral silences 

To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds. 



Browning's Philosophy of Life 155 

If Wordsworth's was the priestly temperament, and 
Tennyson's is the artistic, it may be said that Browning's 
was something broader than both: the nobly human tem- 
perament, which cleaves to man, and seeks to understand 
his hopes and fears, and judges him by the standard of 
a catholic charity. In this respect it is no exaggeration 
to say that Browning more nearly resembles Shakespeare 
than any poet of the last three hundred years; for we can 
imagine Shakespeare as having moved among men with 
the same genial and understanding sympathy, and as inter- 
preting the men of his day with an insight similar to, if 
broader and more profound than. Browning's. 

The immediate result of this temper in Browning is, 
that no poet has exhibited such variety, and this variety 
sprmgs from the multiplicity of subjects in which he is 
interested. His poems cover dissertations on art and 
music, stories of adventure, strangely vivid and exact 
reproductions of mediaeval life and thought, glimpses of 
the authentic life of the ancient world not less than of the 
modern, yet all touched with that precision which marks 
the student and the scholar. In the company of Robert 
Browning you see from the prosaic eminence of a London 
common the overthrow of Sodom, and the dread vision 
of the Last Judgment, as in the wonderful poem called 
"Easter Day"; you sail in Venetian gondolas witnessing 
the drama of passion and crime; you hide with conspira- 
tors in the ruined aqueducts of modern Italy; the scene 
changes from the Ghetto to the Morgue; from the by- 
ways of London to the deserts of Arabia; from the tent 
of Saul to the plains of "glorious guilty Babylon"; from 
the Shambles' Gate, where the patriot rides out to death 
upon his hurdle, to the splendid chambers of the connois- 



156 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

seur, crowded with the spoils of Renaissance art, where 
the Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's. Nothing in 
the drama of human life seems to escape Browning; its 
minutest by-play rivets his attention not less than its 
master passions. He writes, in fact, like a citizen of the 
world, with a shrewd, hard, piercing intelligence, which 
goes straight to the heart of things, touching them off 
with gentle cynicism, or laying them bare with the light- 
ning flash of inspired insight. He is essentially dramatic; 
that is to say, he habitually loses himself in the individu- 
ality of the person he represents, his main question being, 
"Now, what did this man think, that he acted thus.!"' 
He frequently labors with minute care to build up his pic- 
ture of the man's condition, till we begin to be impatient 
of his patience; then suddenly, with some short, sharp 
flash of thought, the whole soul of the man is revealed 
as by lightning, and the poem ends. What, then, is 
Browning's view of life? His view of religion we may 
conveniently leave for a separate chapter. Let us ask 
now, What is his view of life? 

The first and chief point in Browning's view of life 
is his intense sense of the reality of God and the human 

soul. 

He glows above 
With scarce an intervention, presses close 
And palpitatingly. His soul o'er ours. 

These are the twin Pharos-lights of earthly life; the wild 
surge of circumstance breaks and darkens on all sides, but 
these abide. It matters not what is lost if God be found, 
or how much is swept down into the roaring wells of the 
hungry sea of oblivion if the soul be saved. 



Browning's Philosophy of Life 157 

In man's self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types 
Of a dim splendor ever on before. 
In that eternal circle life pursues. 

In all moments of supreme passion and impulse we feel 
how thin is that veil which shuts us from eternity. The 
lover in the "Last Ride" utters this thought when he 
cries: 

Who knows but the world may end to-night? 

These moments of exaltation are the true index to the 
greatness of the soul of man, and therefore are to be 
sought and cherished above all other gain. What are 
progress, science, knowledge, love, art, in the light of 
these higher thoughts? They are simply so many golden 
roads which lead to God, so many shining stairs on which 
the half-visible shapes of spiritual presences go up and 
down. There is a world of spirit as of sense, and the 
gleams of spiritual knowledge which visit us 

Were meant 
To sting with hunger for full light. 

Art is not to be praised for what it achieves, but for 
what it aspires to. It is the yearning of the spirit, not 
the skill of the hand, which gives it its real value. 

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 

Not God's, and not the beasts'; God is, they are, 

Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be. 

No English poet has written so fully upon art and 
music, or has shown more conclusively an exact knowl- 
edge and delicate taste in both; but no poet is less of a 
dilettante. Art is simply an aspiration; when the artist 
is satisfied with his work, then he has renounced all that 



158 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

made his art true and worthy. The mere visible results 
of art are worthless in themselves, and the passion of 
accumulating them an ignoble passion, if it has no higher 
purposes. Contempt can go no farther than to picture 
such a connoisseur, who — 

Above all epitaphs 
Aspires to have his tomb describe 
Himself as sole among the tribe 
Of snuff-box fanciers who possessed 
A Grignon with the Regent's crest. 

On the other hand, it is in the pursuit of true art that 
Abt Vogler gets his vision of truth itself, and cries: 

All we have willed and hoped or dreamed of good shall exist, 

Not in semblance, but in itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist, 

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky. 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard. 

Enough that He heard it once; we shall hear it by and by. 

Upon the general text of this view of life Browning 
perpetually engrafts other lessons. For instance, he is 
fond of showing that it is better and grander to fail in 
great things than to succeed in little ones. What though 
the patriot goes out at the Shambles' Gate, remember- 
ing, as he rides, the flags flung wide for him a year 
before.'' 

Thus I entered, and thus I go! 

In triumphs people have dropped down dead. 
" Paid by the World — what dost thou owe 

Me?" God might question; now instead 
'Tis God shall repay! I am safer so. 



Browning's Philosophy of Life 159 

So again, in the "Grammarian's Funeral," Browning 
puts into four terse and epigrammatic lines the same truth: 

This low man seeks a little thing to do, 

Sees it and does it; 
This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 

Dies ere he knows it. 

A point which Browning is never weary of illustrating 
is, that to all men there come moments of half-inspired 
insight, the keen and perhaps momentary thrill of great 
impulses, and that a man's whole eternity hangs upon the 
use of such visitations. The revelation may be made in 
human love; it may be a vision of knowledge or of duty; 
but it is imperative that when such transfiguring moments 
come we should be ready to seize them. In such divine 
moments we see the narrow way that leads to life eternal. 

There are flashes struck from midnights, 

There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
Whereby piled-up honors perish, 

Whereby swoln ambitions dwindle; 
While just this or that poor impulse. 

Which for once had play unstifled. 
Seems the whole work of a lifetime. 

That away tlie rest has trifled. 

What if it be said such moments are transient, that 
ecstasy is rare, that such high visions fade as soon as 
born.? The vision may perish, but the lesson it reveals 
remains. Life which is not vivified by faith and emotion 
is scarcely life at all. The worst of all woes is worldli- 
ness; to sink down in tranquil acquiescence before the 
customs of a low-pitched life, and never to break through 
into that eternal world which invests the visible world like 
an invisible atmosphere — this is spiritual death, and there 



i6o Literary Leaders of Modern England 

is no death to be feared but that. Why, the very grass- 
hopper 

Spends itself in leaps all day 
To reach the sun, you want the eyes 
To see, as they the wings to rise 
And match the noble hearts of them. 

Would the grasshopper, with his "passionate Hfe," 
change estate with the mole that gropes in his "veritable 
muck".'' Thus the vision of life which shapes itself to 
Browning is the vision of a great world in which the spirit- 
ual is ever in peril of being throttled by the sordid. 

The general issue of Browning's philosophy of life is, 
then, that life is probation and education. Nothing is of 
value in itself but for what it leads to, for the help that it 
may yield the spirit in its long battle to gain enfranchise- 
ment from the flesh, and inheritance with God. Just as 
the utmost spoil of knowledge only serves to sting us with 
hunger for fuller light, so the utmost wealth of love only 
reveals to us the infinite possibilities of the love of God. 
There is "no pause in the leading and the light": 

There's heaven above, and night by night 
I look right through its gorgeous roof; 
For I intend to get to God. 

Life has manifold sweet and pleasant uses; let the 
odor of the April, and the freshness of the sea, the miracle 
of science, the ineifable yearning of perfect music, or the 
spell of perfect art, find their just and proper place in the 
category of life, and be accepted with no ascetic scruple, 
but genial gratitude. But they are nothing more than 
broken hints, by which men learn the alphabet of better 
life. And it is because to rest in these things is death 
that Browning so eagerly applauds any life that flings 



Browning's Philosophy of Life i6i 

itself away in endeavors after thie distant and unattainable, 
and is at all times so merciful toward earthly failure. He 
loves to show us that beneath the rough husk of lives 
which seem wasted, there lies hidden the true seed of a 
life which will one day bloom consummate in beauty. He 
loves equally to take up some apparently successful life, 
and pierce it with his caustic humor, and point out its 
essential emptiness with an irony so keen and stern that 
it would be bitter were it not softened by the pathos of a 
human-hearted pity. Above all, there is no touch of 
pessimism in him: he looks undismayed above present 
evils to the brightening of a diviner day. He says, with 
Abt Vogler: 

Therefore, to whom turn I, but to Thee, the ineffable Name? 
Builder and Maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! 
What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same? 
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power 

expands? 
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as 
before. 
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; 
On the earth, the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What circumstances of Browning's life were in marked 
contrast with those of Wordsworth and Tennyson? 

2. In what respect is Browning unique among modern poets? 

3. What great variety of subjects are treated in Browning's 
poetry? 

4. What is the first great point to be noted in Browning's 
view of life? 

5. What is his general view of art? 

6. How are his views brought out in his pictures of the 
"connoisseur" and of "Abt Vogler"? 



1 62, Literary Leaders of Modern England 

7. What lesson does he teach in his poem of " The Patriot "? 

8. What other great experience in human h'fe is he fond of 
illustrating? 

9. What in general is his view of the meaning of life? 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Essays on Robert Browning s Poetry. J. T. Nettleship. 
Poets arid Problems. George Willis Cooke. 
Literary Studies. Vol. II. (Wordsworth, Tennyson, and 
Browning.) Walter Bagehot. 

Studies in Literature. Edward Dowden. 
The Victoriaji Poets. E. C. Stedman. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION 

Having said so much as I have about Browning's 
intense interest in hfe, it naturally follows that something 
should be said about his attitude to religion, and the spirit 
of his religious teaching". The great poet is necessarily a 
great believer. The faculty which pierces to the unseen, 
and works in constant delicate contact with the invisible, 
is a faculty absolutely necessary to the equipment of a 
true poet. The poetry of faithfulness is an abnormal 
growth. It has little range or vitality. It never attains 
to really high and memorable results. When the spring 
of faith is broken, every faculty of the mind seems to 
share in the vast disaster. And especially do the facul- 
ties of imagination, spiritual insight, and tender fancy, 
which are the master architects of poetry, suffer. The 
loss of faith strikes a chill to the central core of being, and 
robs the artist of more than half the material from which 
the highest poetry is woven. 

On the other hand, the power of spiritual apprehension 
is one of the surest signs whereby we know a great poet. 
It is the function of the great poet to be a seer and inter- 
preter. He sees farther, deeper, and higher than ordi- 
nary men, and interprets for the common man what he 
dimly feels, but does not fully apprehend. It is quite 
possible that the message of the poet, the result of his 
spiritual insight, may not shape with our preconceived 

163 



164 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

notions and theories; but where the spiritual insight is 
sure and real, the true poet never fails to quicken insight 
in his reader. Perhaps no man has done more in our 
generation to quicken and sharpen the spiritual insight of 
men than Browning. Pre-eminently he is a religious poet. 
Religion enters into all his work, like a fragrance or a 
color which clings to some delicate and lovely fabric, and 
while occasionally subdued or modified, is never lost. 
Browning's vast knowledge of the world never degener- 
ates into worldliness. He seeks to know the world in all 
its aspects, all its strange and vague contradictions, and 
seeks rather than shuns its sad and seamy side. If he is 
an optimist, it is not because he is an idealist, and the 
most striking thing about his optimism is, that it thrives in 
the full knowledge of the baseness and evil of the world. 
But the curiosity which impels Browning to investigate the 
darker side of life is never altogether an artistic curiosity: 
It is a religious curiosity. What, then, is the net result.-* 
What are the great facts on which he builds his faith.? 
What are the sources of the religious buoyancy which is 
so remarkable in so thorough a citizen of the world, and 
especially in an age when so many of the foremost writers 
and thinkers have given themselves over to agnosticism or 
despair.'' 

Now, the actual religion of a man can usually be 
reduced to a few simple truths which are grasped with 
entire behef, and thus become the working principles of 
his life. Few men believe with equal conviction all the 
various dogmas of religious truth; but while many may 
remain obscure, there are others which are revealed with 
a vividness of light and force which constitute them hence- 
forth the pillars of a man's real life. Thus, for instance. 



The Spirit of Browning's Religion 165 

St. James has defined what pure rehgion and undefiled 
meant to him in one simple and sufficing formula — charity 
and unworldliness, visiting the fatherless, and keeping the 
soul unspotted from the world. So Browning has grasped, 
with all his force, certain religious truths which appear to 
him the soul and marrow of Christianity, and these consti- 
tute the spirit of his religion. 

The best illustration of the working of Browning's 
genius in the realm of religious truth may be found in 
such a poem -as "Easter Day." This poem is a wonder- 
ful poem in more respects than one: it is wonderful in its 
imagery, its intensity of insight, its daring, its vividness, 
the closeness of its reasoning, the sustained splendor of 
its diction, the prophetic force of its conclusions. It 
begins with the discussion of two speakers, who agree 
"How very hard it is to be a Christian." But each 
speaker utters the phrase in a different sense: the one 
finds Christianity hard as a matter of faith, unproved to 
the intellect; the other, as a matter of practice, unrealized 
in the life. It would not be difficult to be a martyr, and 
find a Hand plunged through the flame to pluck the soul 
up to God, if indeed one could be certain of any such 
result; it is hard to believe on less than scientific evidence. 
To renounce the world on such evidence as we have would 
be folly. Suppose, after such renunciation, a man found 
he had given up the only world there was for him.'' Then 
ensues the poem itself, which consists of the description 
of a vision of the final judgment which the man of faith 
received, and which shook him out of the very web of 
negation in which his friend struggles. Suddenly, as he 
crossed a common at midnight, occupied with these very 
thoughts, all the midnight became "one fire." There 



1 66 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

shot across the dome of heaven, "Hke horror and astonish- 
ment," 

A fierce vindictive scribble of red, 
And straight I was aware 

That the whole rib-work round, minute 

Cloud touching cloud beyond compute 

Was tinted, each with its own spot 

Of burning at the core, till clot 

Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire 

Over all heaven. 

This awful vision burned away all darkness from his 
spirit, and he knew that he had chosen, not God, but the 
World. Instantly he resolved to defend and applaud his 
choice. God ha'd created him to appreciate the beauties 
of life, and he had not put aside the boon unused — that 
was all. But at that instant there came a final belch of 

fire, and he saw God — 

Like the smoke 
Pillared o'er Sodom when day broke — 
I saw him. 

Then God spoke. He had chosen the world; let him 
glut his sense upon the workl, but remember he was shut 
out from the heaven of spirit. But what was the world, 
with all its brave show of beauty.-' Merely one rose of 
God's making, flung 

Out of a summer's opulence, 
Over the Eden barrier, whence 
Thou art excluded. 

Well, then, he would choose art, to which the voice of 
God replies yet more sternly that art is less than nature; 
and its highest trophies the shame and despair of artists, 
who sought therein to express the invisible whole of which 
they perceived but a part. Then he will choose mind. 



The Spirit of Browning's Religion 167 

the joys of intellect; but what again, rephes the Judge, is 
mind but a gleam which to the devout thinker 

Makes bright the earth an age — 
Now, the whole sun's his heritage! 

Lastly, he perceives there is nothing left but love, and 
that shall be his choice. 

God is: thou art — the rest is hurled 
To nothingness. 

He has doubted the story of Christ because he could 
not conceive so great love in God — 

Upon the ground 
That in the story had been found 
Too much love! How could God love so? 
He, who in all His works below, 
Adapted to the needs of man. 
Made love the basis of His plan, 
Did love, as was demonstrated. 

In that moment he saw that God's love was the solu- 
tion of all intellectual difficulties, and then, as he lay prone 
and overwhelmed. 

The whole God within his eyes 
Embraced me. 

So the poem ends — a vision of divine, unalterable love 
as the solution of the mystery of the universe. 

The infinite issue of human choice is, again, one of 
those strong beliefs which with Browning form the spirit 
of his religion. He reiterates persistently and in many 
forms that any choice which falls short of God is ruinous 
in its sequence. For instance, the speaker in "Easter 
Day" is taught the folly of choosing mind by perceiving 
that the highest geniu§ of man is but a gleam from the 



1 68 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

unexhausted sun which pours light through an eternal 
world. But Browning, in one of his greatest poems, 
"Paracelsus," has gone much farther than this. In that 
poem he has shown that intellect without love, without 
morality, without character, is of all forces the most peril- 
ous. Paracelsus has sought to know. What has his 
desire brought him but bitterness and disappointment.'' 
So poignant is his sense of failure that he even cries: 

Mind is nothing but disease, 
And natural health is ignorance. 

And in the final pathetic scene he derides the folly of such 
intellectual passions as those which have consumed him, 
and sees clearly that to love is better than to know. 

No, no; 
Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity; 
These are its sign and note and character, 
And these I have lost. 

Indeed, throughout his writings Browning shows him- 
self inexorably opposed to the modern theistic philosophy 
which makes the individual the center of the universe, and 
steadily teaches the more ancient doctrine of Him who, 
being rich, for our sakes became poor, that we, by His 
poverty, might become rich — 

Renounce joy for my fellow's sake? That's joy 
Beyond joy. 

But this all-present sense of God's love implies also 
such truths as communion, prayer, providence; and these 
also are incorporated in Browning's religion. The noblest 
example of Browning's expression of these doctrines is 
found in the short but splendid poem, "Instans Tyran- 
nus." It is the tyrant who speaks. Out of the million 



The Spirit of Browning's Religion 169 

or two of men he possesses there is one man not at all to 
his mind. He struck him, of course, but though pinned 
to the earth with the persistence of so great a hate, he 
neither moaned nor cursed. He is nothing but a toad or 
rat, but nevertheless the tyrant cannot eat in peace while 
he lives to anger him with his abominable meekness. So 
he soberly lays his last plan to extinguish the man — 

When sudden . . . how think ye? the end 

Did I say " without friend "? 

Say, rather, from marge to blue marge, 

The whole sky grew his targe, 

With the sun's self for visible boss. 

While an arm ran across! 

Do you see? Just my vengeance complete, 

The man sprang to his feet. 

Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! 

— So /was afraid? 

The poem is a sort of magnificent version of the familiar 
hymn-lines: 

Strong to deliver, and good to redeem 

The weakest believer who hangs upon Him. 

The center of Browning's whole world of religious 
thought lies in his abiding sense and conviction that God 
is love. It reconciles him to the mysteries of faith, it 
casts a bright bridge of gleaming hope across the pro- 
found gulfs of human error, and like the lunar rainbow he 
describes, a second and mightier bow springs from the 
first, and stands vast and steady above the mysterious 
portals of human destiny, on whose straining topmost arc 
he sees emerge the foot of God himself. "God is good, 
God is wise, God is love," is the perpetual whisper of 
spiritual voices, floating over him, and piercing with their 



lyo Literary Leaders of Modern England 

divine sweetness the evil darkness of the tortuous way he 
threads in tracking out the strange secrets of human 
impulse and achievement. All knowledge is but the 
shadow of God's light; all purity and constancy of human 
passion but the hint of His love; all beauty but the fitful 
gleam of His raiment as He passes us — that King in His 
beauty whose very face itself we shall at last behold in the 
land that is very far off. If Browning stands amid the 
ruins of that mighty city, which in a single year sent its 
million fighters forth, and 

Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time 

Sprang sublime, 
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced 

As they raced, 

it is to turn at last from the vision of that domed and 
daring palace, the splendid spectacle of power and pomp, 

to cry: 

Shut them in, 

With their triumphs, and their glories, and the rest; 

Love is best! 

If he considers the failing of human power in the pres- 
eiice of death, it is only to exclaim, in his "Rabbi Ben 
Ezra," with a sense of triumphant gladness: 
Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be. 
The last of life for which the first was made; 
Our times are in His hand, 
Who saith: "A whole I planned. 
Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be afraid!" 

He has infinite faith in God, that His love will, in ways 
unknown to us, work out ultimate blessedness for His 
children, and that the world will not pass out in darkness, 
but in the end of the ages it will be daybreak everywhere. 



The Spirit of Browning's Religion 171 

Not only is there no despair: there is no touch of dis- 

heartenment even in Browning — 

Languor is not in his heart, 
Weakness is not in his word, 
Weariness not on his brow. 

He awaits the revelation of eternity; then all will be made 
clear. The lost leader, who has forsaken the great cause 
of progress — "just for a handful of silver he left us" — 
may never be received back save in doubt, hesitation, and 
pain by his old comrades; but the estrangement of earth 
will not outlast earth — 

Let him receive the new knowledge and wait us 
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! 

Caponsacchi, the great and noble priest, the "soldier- 
saint" of "The Ring and the Book," must needs hence- 
forth pass through life with the shadow of Pompilia's 
sweet presence laid across his heart, and all the purest 
aspiration of his life covered in her grave. Well, is there 
not a further world, where they neither marry nor are 
given in marriage.'' 

Oh, how right it is! how like Jesus Christ 

To say that! 

So let him wait God's instant, men call years; 

Meanwhile hold hard by truth and his great soul, 

Do out the duty! 

The dying Pompilia sees how the love of souls like his 
interprets the meaning of the love of God, and cries: 

Through such souls alone 
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light 
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise. 

Even when Browning stands in such a place as the 
morgue, amid the ghastliness of tragic failure and despair, 



172 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

touched though he be with mournfulness, yet this strong 
and hving hope does not leave him, and he still can write: 

It's wiser being good than bad, 

It's safer being meek than fierce, 
It's fitter being sane than mad. 

My own hope is, the sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; 

That, after Last, returns the First, 
Though a wide compass first be fetched; 

That what began best can't end worst, 

Nor what God blest once prove accurst. 

In other words, whatever dreary intervals there may 
be of folly, darkness, misery, the world God blessed in the 
beginning will roll round into the light at last; and when 
His purpose is complete, there will be a new heaven and 
a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What is one of tlie surest signs of a great poet? 

2. Is Browning an optimist because he does not know life? 

3. What is the story of the poem " Easter Day "? 

4. How does Browning emphasize the importance of choos- 
ing the higliest? 

5. How does he express the doctrine of unselfishness? 

6. What great truths are illustrated in " Instans Tyrannus "? 

7. Give an instance of his teaching that God is Love. 

8. Show how he regards the next world as completing this 
one. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brownhig as a Religious Teacher. Henry Jones. 
Studies in the Poetry of Browning. James Fotheringham. 
Browning" s Wcnien. Mary E. Burt. 

Browtting Studies. Select Papers by Members of the 
Browning Society. Edited by Edward Berdoe. 

Bostoti Browning Society Papers. (Selected.) 1886-1897. 



CHAPTER XVI 

BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY- 
CONCLUDING SURVEY 

In the last chapter we noticed that one of the abnormal 
growths of modern poetry is a poetry of negation. We 
may add that this, in its last development, has become a 
poetry of despair. And the source of that despair is 
inability to receive the truths of Christianity. Since the 
advent of Goethe a movement very similar to the Renais- 
sance in Italy has passed over the whole of Europe. 
There has been a return to paganism, concurrently with 
a widespread revival in art and culture. The dogmas of 
the church have been vehemently assailed, and the ethical 
teachings of Christianity disputed. The movement initi- 
ated by Goethe has spread throughout the world. It has 
received impulse from strange quarters, and given impulse 
in strange directions. Its legitimate outcome in Germany 
is found in the long line of great scholars who have 
devoted indefatigable genius and patience to the work of 
destructive Biblical criticism. There may appear to be a 
wide enough gulf between the calm paganism of Goethe 
and the vehement controversial temper of German theologi- 
cal scholarship, but nevertheless the one is a true child of 
the other. 

Added to this, there must be reckoned the extraordi- 
nary growth of natural science during the present century. 
The minds of the greatest thinkers have been riveted on 

173 



174 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

the problem of the origin of things. The resuhs of their 
investigations have been pubhshed with the hardihood and 
confidence of complete conviction. In their researches as 
to the working of natural law they have completely ignored 
all that is supernatural. Their temper toward the super- 
natural has been one of contemptuous indifference or embit- 
tered hostility. Thus, then, two forces of immense 
strength have been steadily at work upon the structure of 
received opinion: the one force, fearless rationalism; the 
other, fearless paganism. Culture has been preached as 
the true substitute for Christianity, art, and beauty as the 
all-sufficient gospels for human life. We have only to 
turn to the literature of the last half-century to see how 
far these influences have permeated. The essayist and 
poet have alike conspired to preach the new doctrine. 
The stream of tendency thus created has sufficient exam- 
ples in the beautiful paganism of Keats and the garrulous 
media^valism of Morris. 

But there is another class of writers who have not been 
able so easily to dismiss the great beliefs by which centu- 
ries of men and women have lived and striven. They 
have been allured, fascinated, and repelled alternately; 
they have hoped and doubted; in their voices is the sound 
of weeping, in their words the vibration of long suffering; 
for whatever attitude they may have taken toward Christi- 
anity they have never relapsed into reckless indifference. 
This eager scrutiny of religious dogmas by the best and 
keenest minds of the age is, at least, a proof that such 
men have been alive, and even agonizingly alive, to the 
tremendous importance of those dogmas. Poetry in the 
nineteenth century has sought to be the minister of theo- 
logical truth not less than of artistic beauty, and as a con- 



Browning's Attitude to Christianity 175 

sequence the theological problems of the century, and in 
less degree the scientific problems also, have been inextri- 
cably interwoven with its fine warp and woof of exquisite 
creation. So that let what will be said about the faith- 
lessness of the nineteenth century, nevertheless the pres- 
ence of Jesus Christ in nineteenth-century literature is one 
of its most remarkable and indisputable characteristics. 

But the solitary issue of this intermingling of theology 
with poetry is not perplexity or sadness. There is found 
a very different culmination in one poet at least, and that 
poet is Browning. Browning has attacked theology with 
the zeal and fervor of a born disputant. He is not merely 
a great religious poet, but is distinctively a theological 
poet. He has deliberately chosen for the exercise of his 
art the most subtle problems of theology, and has made 
his verse the vehicle for the statement of theological diffi- 
culties and personal beliefs. The historical evidences and 
arguments of Christianity have exercised upon him a deep 
and enduring fascination. In "Pauline," his earliest 
poem, the vision of Christ has visited Browning, and he 
cries— 

Thou pale form, so dimly seen, deep-eyed, 

1 have denied Thee calmly — do I not 

Pant when I read of Thy consummate deeds, 
And burn to see Thy calm pure truth outflash 
The brightest gleams of earth's philosophy? 
Do I not shake to hear ought question Thee? 
If I am erring, save me, madden me. 
Take from me powers and pleasures, let me die 
Ages, so I see Thee! 

That vision of Christ has been not only an ever-present 
but an ever-growing vision with Browning. 

This spirit of passionate reverence for Christ, which 



176 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Browning thus expresses in his first considerable poem, is 
the spirit which dominates his entire writings. The deep- 
est mystery of Christianity is Christ himself; that, indeed, 
is its one mystery. Browning has been quick to realize 
this, and habitually perceives and teaches, with unerring 
keenness, that in Christ all mysteries have solution, or 
without him are left forever dark and impenetrable. The 
method of argument he pursues is peculiarly his own. 
He ranks himself for the moment with the Rationalist, and 
having detailed his conclusions, goes on to probe them. 
For this purpose dialectic skill, irony, humor, and the 
subtlest analysis are his weapons. He refuses to be con- 
tent with negation; it is not enough to say what you do 
not believe, you must realize what you do believe. He 
pushes back the burden of proof upon the doubter, and 
says men have an equal right to demand the demonstra- 
tion of a doubt as of a creed. When every shred of evi- 
dence has been weighed and tested, then comes the moment 
to ask what is left, and the final verdict depends, not on 
the letter of the evidence, but the spirit; not on anybody 
of oral attestation, but on the soul which witnesses within 
a man. This, with many variations and differences, is, 
upon the whole, a fair statement of Browning's method 
of argument, and the result is never left in doubt. In 
"A Death in the Desert," where St. John is supposed to 
utter his last words of belief, the verdict, not indeed of 
the man Cerinthus, who hears the great confession, but of 
the man who adds the final note, is: 

If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men, 
Mere man, the first and best, but nothing more, 
Account Him, for reward of what He was, 
Now and forever, wretchedest of all. 



Browning's Attitude to Christianity 177 

Can a mere man do this? 
Yet Christ saith this He lived and died to do. 
Call Christ then the illimitable God, 
Or lost! 

and he significantly adds — 

But 'twas Cerinthus that is lost. 

In the "Epistle of Karshish," in which the strange 
story of Lazarus is debated from the physician's point of 
view, the writer finally rises into a very ecstasy of faith, 
and the poem closes with this passionate exclamation: 

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice. 
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself! 
Thou hast no power, nor may conceive of Mine. 
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love. 
And thou must love Me who have died for thee." 

It cannot be said that there is the faintest touch of 
intolerance or scorn for honest doubt in Browning's 
poetry. Yet no man of our days has pierced it with so 
many telling shafts of irony and reason. He acknowl- 
edges the difficulties of belief, and it is plain to every 
reader that Browning has wrestled sorely with the angel 
in the night, with that impalpable and dreadful shape 
which has all but overwhelmed him. But the morning 
has broken and brought its benediction. If the difficulties 
of belief are great, the difficulties of unbelief are greater. 
He assumes that there must be many unexplored remain- 
ders in the world of thought. Well, what then? Because 
some things are hidden, are there none revealed? 



lyS Literary Leaders of Modern England 

What, my soul? See so far and no farther? When doors 

great and small, 
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth 

appal? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all. 

That were the last unreasonableness of ignorance, the final 
folly of imbecility. No; the wiser act is to trust where 
actual knowledge fails. Faith is a very fine word, but 

You must mix some uncertainty 
With faith if you would have faith be. 

If a scientific faith is absurd, and "frustrates the very end 
'twas meant to serve," he will rest content with a mere 
probability — 

So long as there be just enough 
To pin my faith to, though it hap 
Only at points; from gap to gap. 
One hangs up a huge curtain so, 
Grandly, nor seeks to have it go 
Foldless and flat along the wall. 
What care I if some interval 
Of life \ess p/ain/y may depend 
On God? I'd hang there to the end. 

Moreover, it is part of God's good discipline to educate 
us by illusion; the point of victory, the prize of the high 
calling, perpetually recedes to the man who presses toward 
the mark. 

We do not see it, where it is 
At the beginning of the race; 
As we proceed, it shifts its place. 
And where we look for crowns to fall. 
We find the tug's to come — that's all. 

Thus the uncertainties of knowledge are in themselves a 
beneficent training for the spirit of man; they sting him 



Browning's Attitude to Christianity 179 

with this divine hunger for full light, they soften him to 
childlike blessedness of mere trust, and tend to the more 
real and vivid hold upon the creed itself, by shaking from 
it "the torpor of assurance." 

No poet of our time has so consistently attacked the 
darker and more tangled problems of human conduct. 
He confesses that "serene deadness" puts him out of 
temper. His sympathies, on the other hand, go out irre- 
sistibly toward any sort of life, however strangely mistaken 
or at variance with custom, which has real, throbbing, 
energetic vitality in it. To him there is an overwhelming 
fascination in misunderstood men, and the more tangled 
and intricate is the problem of character and action the 
more eagerly does he approach it. Not unnaturally this 
tendency of Browning's genius has led him through many 
of the darker labyrinths of human motive, and occasion- 
ally, as in "Mr. Sludge, the Medium," the riddle has not 
been worth the prolonged application he has devoted to 
it. But in no class of poems is Browning's intense reli- 
gious conviction more remarkably displayed. The same 
retreat upon mere faith which he makes in subtle ques- 
tions of theology he observes also in dealing with the 
mysteries of human conduct. His method of treatment 
is twofold. The majority of his poems which deal with 
character and conduct deal with character and conduct 
more or less imperfect. In all such cases the blemish is 
laid bare with unerring accuracy. There are no glozing 
words to cover moral lapses, no spun purple of fine 
phrases to hide the hideousness of spiritual leprosy. But 
Browning describes such lives, not to display their corrup- 
tion, but to discover some seed of true life which may yet 
be hidden in them. Few lives are so evil but that some 



i8o Literary Leaders of Modern England 

golden threads are woven in the coarse fabric; some 'im- 
pulses are left which, if followed, may be the clue to life 
eternal. 

Oh, we're sunk enough, God knows! 
But not quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure, though seldom, are denied us 
When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
• And apprise it, if pursuing 
On the right way or the wrong way. 
To its triumph or undoing. 

The "poor impulse," the one obscure, true instinct, 
which vibrates under a smothered or sinful nature, may 
be the starting-point towards ideal goodness. But if man 
be evil, God is good, and the soul of the universe is just. 
Browning is bound to admit that some natures seem hope- 
lessly corrupt; at all events, he fails to find the germ of 
renovation in them. They have chosen the evil part, 
which cannot be taken away from them. They have had 
their choice — 

The earthly joys lay palpable — 
A taint, in each distinct as well; 
The heavenly flitted, faint and rare. 
Above them, but as truly were 
Taintless, so, in their nature best. 
Thy choice was earth; thou didst attest 
'Twas fitter spirit should subserve 
The flesh. 

When Browning confronts such natures, his second method 
comes into play; he falls back upon faith — faith in the 
wise order and infinite goodness of God. The most 
marked example of this method is in that splendid dramatic 
sketch, "Pippa Passes." No more awful picture of guilt 



Robert Browning — Concluding Survey i8i 

triumphing in its guiltiness, of corruption intoxicated with 
the abandonment and depraved joy of its own wickedness, 
has any poet given us than the Ottima of that poem. 
There stands the villa, with its closed shutters; within it 
the murdered man, and the guilty woman pouring out her 
confessions of passion to the man who slew him. Can 
human action produce a more hideous combination.'' Yet 
the sun shines fair, and "God has not said a word." 
Has God's good government of things broken down, then.'' 
No, indeed. Pippa passes — Pippa, the poor girl with her 
one day's holiday in the whole year, yet happy, cheerful, 
trustful; and as she pauses she sings rebuke to our doubts 
of God, and terror to the black heart of Ottima: 

The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the morn; 
Morning's at seven; 
The hillside's dew-pearled; 
The lark's on the wing, 
God's in His heaven, 
All's right with the world. 

It is thus Browning, like many a great spirit before 
him, falls back upon faith in God, saying in effect what 
Abraham said when confronted with the corruption of man 
and the judgment of God: "Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right.'"' 

The prevalent impression which the work of Browning 
leaves upon the reader is twofold: he makes us feel the 
greatness of his mind and the intensity and breadth of his 
sympathies. It is a vast world of thought to which Brown- 
ing introduces his reader. He claims from him absolute 
attention, the entire absorption of the neophyte, whose 
whole moral earnestness is given to his task. Like all 



I 8 2 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

neophytes, we have to submit to a process of initiation. 
In the world of Browning's thought there is much that is 
strange, much that is new, much that is grotesque. 

Perhaps the best way of sifting the perfect from the 
imperfect in Browning's work would be to ask what we 
should care least to lose, and what we would most will- 
ingly forget. If we had to submit to an ideal justice for 
the final jurisdiction of immortality the poems most likely 
to win him the award of age-long fame, which should we 
choose to support the claim.? 

When we apply this test to Browning's poetry the result 
is soon reached. First of all stands the "Ring and the 
Book." In force of conception, skill and delicacy of 
treatment, subtlety of thought, purity, power, and passion, 
the "Ring and the Book" is Browning's masterpiece. 
Wandering in Florence, Browning discovers on a book- 
stall an old manuscript volume containing the pleadings of 
a murder trial at Rome in 1698. The whole case is one 
of those strange tangles of evidence which dull people 
usually discredit until the passions of human life flame 
forth, and the thing is a dramatic actuality, done before 
their very eyes. The murdered woman is Pompilia, who 
has fled from her husband with the priest Caponsacchi; 
the murderer is the husband. At first sight this appears 
merely a low drama of vicious passion and brutal revenge; 
but as Browning pores over the pleadings and unravels 
the tangled skein of evidence it reveals itself in a very 
different way. As he reads, the dark shadows of crime 
recede, revealing in transfiguring brightness the figure of 
Pompilia, "young, good, beautiful," clothed upon with 
the raiment which is from heaven, the beauty of holiness, 
the divine dignity of goodness, the touching, inimitable 



Robert Browning — Concluding Survey 183 

freshness and purity of childlike innocence. A mere child 
in years, she is the spoil of her husband's avarice, then 
the victim of his malignity and disappointed cupidity, until 
at last she flies, to save her babe's life, with the young 
priest who has promised to defend her. Browning's 
method is to let each witness tell his own tale, making 
the written report his basis of fact, on which he casts his 
own quick, penetrating light of interpretation. This is 
accomplished in twelve books. The one-half of Rome 
gives its opinion, takes merely the outward appearance of 
the facts, and judges Guido justified in the murder. The 
other half of Rome accepts Pompilia's innocence, and 
perceives that from first to last she has been a victim. 
Then follow" the chief actors in the drama. Guido makes 
his defence — the defence of a man thoroughly shrewd, 
with more than a touch of fanaticism, alive to his posi- 
tion, and alert to use every waft of popular prejudice in 
his favor. After him Caponsacchi tells his tale; how he 
came to enter the church, and was urged by great priests 
to put only an easy interpretation on the vows which 
seemed to him so strenuously solemn; how he came to 
recognize in Pompilia a womanhood he had never before 
imagined — so sadly sweet, so grave, so pure, that he felt 
lifted into higher thoughts as by the vision of a saint; how 
God and Pompilia kept company in his thoughts, so that 
when the hour came that he could serve her he seized it 
with a simple chivalry, and did it as God's plain duty, then 
and there made clear to him. Then Pompilia herself, 
dying fast, in broken snatches, tells the story of her life. 
Finally, the old pope sums up the case, giving verdict of 
death against Guido, and Guido himself pours out his last 
despairing utterances, which reach their tragic climax in the 



184 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

cry to his murdered wife to save him, thus unconsciously 
witnessing to the purity he had defamed and despised. 

The "Ring and the Book" is the most astonishing 
work of genius of our time, and if the narrations of Guido, 
Caponsacchi, and Pompiha do not escape oblivion, it is 
hard to say what other poetry of our day is likely to 
endure and win the suffrages of posterity. 

Another poem which it is impossible to omit in a cate- 
gory of Browning's greatest works is "Paracelsus." It 
may well take rank with the "Ring and the Book" in 
nobility of design and expression; but perhaps the most 
wonderful thing about it is the vision of evolution which 
is found in its concluding pages — pages, let it be noted, 
which were written many years before Darwin had pub- 
lished his "Origin of Species." Let him who would 
measure accurately the immense sweep and power of 
Browning's genius turn to the last fifty pages of "Para- 
celsus." They contain passages which cannot be read, 
even after many readings, without astonishment. Never 
has blank verse been handled with fuller mastery; never 
has it been sustained at a greater height of majesty, even 
by Milton, the greatest of all masters in blank verse. 
What largeness of utterance, and what a picture of God's 
creative joy, and of the earth's rebirth in spring, is there 
in lines like these: 

In the solitary waste strange groups 

Of young volcanos come up, Cyclops-like, 

Staring together with their eyes on flame — 

God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 

Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: 

But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 

Over its breast to waken it: rare verdure 

Buds tenderly upon rough banks. 



Robert Browning — Concluding Survey 185 

The lark 
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; 
Afar the ocean sleeps; w^hite fishing-gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain, and God renews 
His ancient rapture. 

And then follows that vision of the true evolution, which 
it is a shame to quote piecemeal, but of which some sen- 
tences at least must be quoted here: 

Thus God dwells in all, 
From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
To man, the consummation of this scheme 
Of being, the completion of this sphere 
Of life, whose attributes had here and there 
Been scattered o'er the visible world before, 
Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant 
To be united in some wondrous whole, 
Imperfect qualities throughout creation 
Suggesting some one creature yet to make. 
Some point where all these scattered rays shall meet 
Convergent in the faculties or man. 

Progress is 
The law of life: man is not man as yet. 
Nor shall I deem his general object served 
While only here and there a towering mind 
O'erlooks his prostrate fellows: when the host 
Is out at once to the despair of night; 
When all mankind alike is perfected. 
Equal in full-blown powers — then, not till then, 
I say begins man's general infancy. 

"Paracelsus" is a great poem, one of the greatest in 
English literature; and when we read it we cannot wonder 
that one of the first organs of literary opinion in England 
does not hesitate to set Browning close beside Shakespeare. 

In sustained splendor of thought and imagery, but upon 



1 86 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

a lesser scale, "Saul" is also one of the poems which men 
will not readily let die; and one might class with "Saul" 
such wonderful studies as "A Death in the Desert" and 
the "Epistle of Karshish." In "Saul" Browning has 
attained the rare achievement of perfect form and har- 
mony. There is a magnificent music in the billowy 
cadences of "Saul"; it seems to rise and fall not so much 
to the harp of David as to the melodious thunder and 
trumpet-calls of some great organ which floods the uni- 
verse with invisible delight. But such poems as these 
owe their true greatness to the thought which informs 
them. There is no writer of our day, whether of prose 
or poetry, who will so well repay the attention of the 
theological student as Browning. He has so vivid a vision 
of invisible things, so intense a grasp on spiritual facts, 
that he pierces into the heart of religious mystery as no 
other man of our time has done, and it is impossible to 
rise from a course of Browning without a sense of added 
or invigorated faith. The literature of Christian evidence 
has received, in our time, no more important contribu- 
tions than "Easter Day" and "Christmas Eve," the 
"Death in the Desert" and the "Epistle of Karshish." 
The method is Browning's own, but it is used with con- 
summate skill and effect; it is a sword which no other 
man can wield save the craftsman who forged it, but in 
his hand it pierces to the dividing asunder of the bone and 
marrow of current scepticism. As poet and thinker. 
Browning secures a double advantage, and annexes realms 
to his dominion which are not often brought under the 
sway of a common scepter. The fashion of the world 
may change, and the old doubts may wear themselves out 
and sink like shadows out of sight in the morning of a 



Robert Browning — Concluding Survey 187 

stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the 
finer poems of Browning for intellectual stimulus, for the 
purification of pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of 
hope, and will revere him who, in the night of the world's 
doubt, still sang: 

This world's no blot for us, 

Nor blank — it means intensely and means good. 

To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 



Since these criticisms were written, Robert Browning 
has passed away. He retained to the last his genial faith, 
his resolute optimism, his intellectual vigor and subtlety. 
The last poem of his last volume is a sort of summing up 
of himself and his life-work: nor could a more discerning 
summary be found than in the words: 

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward. 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed,though right were worsted.wrong would triumph. 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better. 
Sleep to wake. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. How have the problems of the nineteenth century affected 
the faith of many of its thinking men? 

2. What is Browning's teaching with regard to Christ? 

3. In what spirit does he approach the doubts of men? 

4. What does he teach as to our constantly receding ideals? 

5. How does Browning deal with the tangled problems of 
human conduct? 

6. What is the story of " The Ring and the Book "? 

7. What remarkable vision of evolution is found in the con- 
cluding pages of Paracelsus? 



1 88 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

8. What famous poems of Browning are peculiarly Christian 
in their character? 

9. Quote the stanza from Browning's last poem which sums 
up his own life. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Browning s Message to His Time. Edward Berdoe. 

Records of Tennysofi, Ruskiti, a7td Browning. Anne Thack- 
eray Ritchie. 

Browning Fjicyclopcdia. Edward Berdoe. 

Browning's Complete Works, in one volume, with notes. 
Cambridge Edition, S3.00. 

The Camberwell Edition, in twelve small volumes, with 
notes, 75c each, sold singly. 

There are many excellent small volumes of selected poems. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THOMAS CARLYLE 

Born at Ecclefechan, December 4, 1795. Entered Edinburgh 
University, 1809. Published Life of Schiller, 1825. Married 
Jane Welsh, October, 1826. Contributed to Edinburgh 
Review, Westminster, Foreign Quarterly, etc., 1828-1833, 
when Sartor Resartus was published in Eraser's Magazine, 
French Revolution, 1837. Past and Present, 1843. Latter- 
Day Pamphlets, 1850. Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 
1845. History of Frederick the Great, begun 1858, com- 
pleted 1S65. Elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, 
1865. Died at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, February 5, 1881. 

Taking him for all in all, Thomas Carlyle is the most 
representative and by far the greatest man of genius of 
the nineteenth century. The four notes of genius are 
originality, fertility, coherence, and articulation. He is 
so far original in style and method that there is no one 
with whom we can justly compare him. He followed no 
master, and acknowledged none; his angle of vision on 
all questions was his own, and what he saw he expressed 
in a fashion which decorous literary persons of the old 
order felt to be dazzlingly perverse, startling, eruptive, and 
even outrageous. His mind was also one of the most 
fertile of minds; not so much in the matter of industrious 
production as in the much rarer function of begetting 
great seminal ideas, which reproduced themselves over the 
entire area of modern literature. Coherence marks these 
ideas, for the main principles of his philosophy are so 

189 



190 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

simple and so definite, that from his earhest writings to 
his last there is perfect unity. Lastly, in the matter of 
articulation or expression, he is supreme. He enlarged 
the potentialities of language, as every great literary artist 
does, and in precision, splendor, and suggestiveness of 
phrase stands unapproached. 

But Carlyle was much more even than a great man of 
genius, or a great writer. He never conceived himself, 
nor did any one who knew him intimately conceive him, 
as having found a sufficing expression of himself in his 
writings. He knew himself, and was felt by others, to be 
a great spiritual force. Criticism has had much to say 
upon the strangeness and mass of his genius; it has hardly 
yet apprehended aright his prophetic force. That he 
brought into English literature much that is startling and 
briUiant in style is the least part of the matter; he brought 
also a flaming vehemence of thought, passion, and convic- 
tion, which is unique. Goethe, with his piercing insight, 
was the first to recognize the true nature of the man. He 
discovered Carlyle long before England had beard of him, 
when he was simply an unknown and eccentric young 
Scotsman, who found astonishing difficulty in earning daily 
bread. The great German incontinently brushed aside, as 
of relative unimportance, all questions about his genius, and 
touched the true core of the man and his message, when he 
said that Carlyle was "a new moral force, the extent and 
effects of which it is impossible to predict." In other words, 
Goethe recognized the main fact about him, which was that 
by nature, temperament, and vocation he was a prophet. 

If Carlyle had been asked to state what he understood 
by the word "prophet," he would have laid emphasis upon 
two things: clearness and vividness of vision in the appre- 



Thomas Carlyle 191 

hension of truth, and resolute sincerity in acting on it. 
Carlyle held that there is within every man something 
akin to the Dc^mon of Socrates — intuition, spiritual appre- 
hension, a living monitor and guide; and that the man 
who obeys this inward voice knows by a species of celes- 
tial divination where his path lies, and what his true work 
is. In nothing does the essentially prophetic nature of 
Carlyle appear more plainly than in these qualities. Dur- 
ing the first forty years of his life — forty years spent in 
the desert of the sorest discipline a man could suffer — 
there was no moment when he might not have instantly 
improved his position by a little judicious compromise. 
But all compromise he regarded with scornful anger. He 
might have entered the church, and his spiritual gifts were 
vastly in excess of those of thousands who find in the pul- 
pit an honorable opportunity of utterance. He might 
have obtained a professorship in one or other of the Scotch 
seats of learning, if he had cared to trim his course to 
suit the winds and tides of the ordinary conventions. He 
might at any moment have earned an excellent competence 
by his pen, if he had consented to modify the ruggedness 
of his style and the violence of his opinions to the stan- 
dards of the review editors and their readers. But in 
either of these courses he recognized a fatal peril to his 
sincerity. Poor as he was, he would not budge an inch. 
He was fastidious to what seemed to men like Jeffrey an 
absolutely absurd degree over the honor of his indepen- 
dence. He would make no hair's-breadth advance to meet 
the world; the world must come over to him, bag and 
baggage. He acted with implicit obedience on his intu- 
ition. He had the prophet's stern simplicity of habit. 
He cared nothing for comfort or success; and when at 



192 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

last success came, his Spartan simplicity of life suffered 
no change. If ever man in modern days knew what the 
burden of prophecy meant, what it is to be impelled to 
utterance by an imperious instinct for truth, and to be 
straitened in spirit till the message was spoken, that man 
was Carlyle. It was in this respect that he differed as 
much from the ordinary man of letters as Isaiah in his 
most impassioned moments from the common sermon- 
writer. The pulpit, the bar, the professor's chair, were 
not for him; therefore he seized upon pen and paper as 
the only means left of uttering himself to his age. He 
was perfectly sincere in despising even this as a medium 
for his spiritual activities. He despised writing as a pro- 
fession, because he found that when men began to write 
for bread they became poor creatures, and if they had any 
real message in them they stifled it to win praise or money. 
To both praise and money he was contemptuously in- 
different. His only passion was a passion for truth, and 
to speak this with the least possible of those literary flour- 
ishes which capture popularity was his meat and drink. 

Further than this, Carlyle was both poet and humor- 
ist. He could not indeed write verse. He was never 
able to master the technicalities of the art of meter. He 
was as little able to write a novel, which next to verse 
affords a medium for the man of constructive poetic 
genius. He tried both arts, with rare and partial success 
in the first, and abject failure in the second. Goethe, 
who is the only man who could be spoken of even in a 
partial sense as Carlyle 's master, had a serene equipoise 
of faculty, a fine and supreme artistic sense, which enabled 
him to succeed equally in poetry, drama, fiction, or phil- 
osophy. Carlyle's genius v/as as remarkable as Goethe's, 



Thomas Carlyle 193 

but its powers lay apart in streaming fire-masses, nebu- 
lous and chaotic, and were not co-ordinated into perfect 
harmony by that aesthetic sense which was Goethe's high- 
est gift. But fundamentally he was a poet, and among 
the greatest of poets. He saw everything through the 
medium of an intense and searching imagination. No 
one could describe the impression which his French 
Revolution produces on the mind better than he himself 
has done, when he says: "Nor do I mean to investigate 
much more about it, but to splash down what I know in 
large masses of colors, that it may look like a smoke and 
flame conflagration in the distance, which it is." He 
cannot even walk in Regent Street without exclaiming, 
"To me, through these thin cobwebs, death and eternity 
sate glaring." AU his personal sensations are magnified 
into the same gigantic proportions, now lurid, now gro- 
tesque, by the same atmosphere of imagination through 
which they are perceived. His sensitiveness is extreme, 
poignant, even terrible. When he talks of immensities 
and eternities, he uses no mere stock phrases; he hears 
the rushing of the fire-streams, and the rolling worlds 
overhead, as he hears the dark streams flowing under foot, 
bearing man and all his brave arrays down to "Tartarus, 
and the pale kingdoms of Dis." When he speaks of him- 
self as feeling "spectral," he simply expresses that sense 
of spiritual loneliness, detachment, and mystery out of 
which the deepest poetry of the world has come. To 
judge such a man by ordinary prosaic standards is impos- 
sible. He is of imagination all compact, and his writings 
can only be rightly regarded as the work of a poet who 
has the true spirit of the seer, but is incapable of the 
orthodox forms of poetry. 



194 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

It is perhaps even more essential to remember that 
Carlyle was a humorist of the first order. On the one 
side of his genius he approaches Burns; on the other, 
Swift. He shares with Burns a rugged independence of 
nature, native pride, a sense of the elemental in human 
life, a power of poignant realism, a rare depth and delicacy 
of sentiment; he shares also with him the rolHcking, 
broad, not always decorous humor of the Olympian peas- 
ant, racy of the soil, half-grim, half-boisterous, of which 
Burns has given imperishable examples in "Tam o' 
Shanter" and "Holy Willie's Prayer." But there was 
also mingled in Carlyle's humor a strain of something 
darker and more subtle, akin to the saturnine humor of 
Swift. He has much of that intense and scathing scorn, 
that sardonic and bitter penetration, which made, and still 
preserves, the name of Swift as a name of terror. To be 
sure, we do not find that depth of silent ferocity in Carlyle 
which alarms and appals us in Swift. Swift often thought 
and wrote like a mere savage, smarting with the torture of 
some lacerating, cureless pain. He is at heart a hater of 
his kind, who spits in the face of its most familiar nobili- 
ties, out of mere exasperated truculence. There is some- 
thing abominable and insane in the humor of Swift, with 
only a rare touch of redeeming geniality. But Carlyle's 
humor, in all its sardonic force, still preserves an element 
of geniality. He loves the grotesque and the absurd for 
their own sakes. He cannot long restrain himself from 
laughter, good, wholesome, volleying laughter, directed 
as often against himself as others. Gifts of insight, pas- 
sion, eloquence, and imagination he had in plenty; but 
the greatest and rarest of all his gifts was humor. 

Those who knew Carlyle most intimately have all recog- 



Thomas Carlyle 195 

nized this wonderful gift of humor which was his. It 
was said of him by his friends that when he laughed it 
was Homeric laughter — the laughter of the whole soul 
and body in complete abandonment of mirth. This deep, 
wholesome laughter reverberates through his writings. 
No man is quicker to catch a humorous point, or to make 
it. A collection of Carlyle's best stories, phrases, and 
bits of personal description would make one of the most 
humorous books in the language. He makes sly fun of 
himself, of his poverty, of the unconscious oddities of the 
obscurest people, and equally of the greatest. His rail- 
lery is incessant, his eye for the comic of supreme vigi- 
lance. Of the obscenity of Swift there is no trace; it 
was not in Carlyle to cherish unwholesome thoughts. 
But in the strange mingling of the wildest fun with the 
most penetrating thought, of sardonic bitterness with the 
mellowest laughter, of the most daring and incisive irony 
with deep philosophy and serious feeling, there is much 
that recalls Swift, and suggests his finest qualities. With 
Swift the bitterness closed down like a cloud, and extin- 
guished the humor, with the result of that tragic madness 
which still moves the pity of the world. With Carlyle the 
humor was always in excess of the bitterness, and supplied 
that element of saving health which kept his genius fresh 
and wholesome amid many perils not less real than those 
which destroyed Swift. 

There is one respect in which it is especially necessary 
to recollect this element of humor in Carlyle, if we are to 
judge him correctly, because most of the harsh and unfair 
judgments passed upon him have directly resulted from its 
neglect. It must be remembered that Mrs. Carlyle had 
many qualities in common with her husband, and not the 



196 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

least of these was a similar power of irony and humor. 
She was accustomed to speak of Carlyle in a fashion of 
the freest banter. When his lectures were first announced 
in London there was much speculation among his friends 
whether he would remember to begin orthodoxly with 
"Ladies and gentlemen," to which Mrs. Carlyle replied 
that it was far more likely he would begin with "Fool 
creatures come hither for diversion." Her satiric com- 
ment on the success of the business was, that at last the 
public had apparently decided that he was a man of genius, 
and "worth being kept alive at a moderate rate." Is it 
not conceivable to a person of even moderate intelligence 
that the conversation of two persons so witty, keen- 
tongued, and given to satiric burlesque and banter as the 
Carlyles, was in no sense to be taken literally? Is it not 
further conceivable that many things which look only 
bitter when put into print had a very different effect and 
intention when uttered in the gay repartee of familiar 
conversation? The fact is, that the Carlyles habitually 
addressed one another with irony. It is no uncommon 
thing between intimates: it is rather a sign of the security 
of the affection which unites them. But if, by some 
unhappy accident, a third person who has no sense of 
humor hears this gay clash of keen words, and puts them 
down in dull print, and goes on to point out in his dull 
fashion that they do not sound affectionate, and are 
phrases by no means in common use among excellent 
married persons of average intellects, it is easy to see that 
the worst sort of mischief may readily be wrought. Thus, 
for example, when Mrs. Carlyle lay ill with a nervous 
trouble which made it impossible for her to close her 
mouth, Carlyle, who knew nothing of this peculiarity of 



Thomas Carlyle 197 

her disease, stood solemnly at the foot of her bed one 
day, and said: "Jane, ye'd be in a far more composed 
state of mind if ye'd close your mouth." This story is 
told, forsooth, as an illustration of the harshness of Car- 
lyle to his wife. So far was Mrs. Carlyle from inter- 
preting it in any such way, that she tells it herself with 
inimitable glee, and is keen to describe its ludicrous aspect. 
And as in this instance, so in a hundred more that might 
be analyzed, humor was a dominant quality in all the con- 
versations of Carlyle, and in almost equal degree of his 
wife's also; and it is only by recollecting this that it is 
possible to judge rightly a married life which was passed 
in an atmosphere and under conditions peculiarly its own. 
It is necessary to dwell on this matter with more full- 
ness than it deserves, because nothing has so greatly 
injured Carlyle's reputation and influence as the reported 
infelicities of his domestic life. All these reports depend 
on the testimony of one or two witnesses whose word is 
worthless. Fortunately for us the real truth is preserved, 
not in the chance impressions of friends or guests who 
saw the Carlyles from the outside, but in the mutual cor- 
respondence of husband and wife, in their journals, and 
in their intimate confessions to others through a long 
range of years. There have been many exquisite love- 
letters written by literary men, but there are none to sur- 
pass Carlyle's letters to his wife. No woman was ever 
loved more deeply: had not the love on both sides been 
real and vital there would have been no tragedy to record. 
It was simply because these two were so much to each 
other that the slightest variation of temperature in their 
affection was so keenly and instantaneously felt by each. 
The real source of their difficulties was, that they were too 



19B Literary Leaders of Modern England 

much alike in temper, in methods of thought, and in intel- 
lectual outlook. There was about each that ditificult 
Scottish reticence which sealed the lips and forbade speech 
even when the heart was fullest. The moment they are 
separated, the love-letters flow in a continuous stream — 
love-letters, as I have said, which are the tenderest in the 
language so far as Carlyle is concerned, and which never 
lost their warmth through all the years of a long married 
life. On paper the heart opens itself; face to face they 
cannot speak. As they recede from one another each 
grows in luminous charm, and faults are forgotten, and 
passion is intensified; as they come back from these con- 
stant separations, the glow fades into the light of common 
day, and neither has the tact or grace to retain it. Each 
is exquisitely, even poignantly sensitive, and gives and 
suffers wounds which are totally unsuspected by the other. 
The heart is always at boiling-point; the nerves are always 
quivering; there are no cool, gray reaches of mere pleas- 
ant comradeship between them. It is not difficult to 
understand that in such a marriage there were hours of 
the deepest blackness; but there were also seasons of such 
light and radiance as are never found in duller lives. 

But there was another cause of bitterness, which Car- 
lyle has touched with the utmost delicacy and insight when 
he writes (August 24, 1836): "Oh, my poor bairn, be not 
faithless, but believing! Do not fling life away as insup- 
portable, despicable; but let us work it out, and rest it 
out together, like a true two, though under some obstruc- 
tions." One would have supposed that Carlyle would 
have written "a true one"; but that he had ceased to 
hope for. Mrs. Carlyle's nature was of a stubbornness 
as invincible as his own, and was as deeply independent 



Thomas Carlyle 199 

and original. It galled her to shine only in Carlyle 's 
light. She had a literary faculty, in its way as remarkable 
as her husband's, and she felt that it was obscured by his 
more massive genius. She was not the sort of woman to 
find her life in the life of any man; she craved a separate 
platform. What Carlyle could do to soften and ease 
matters he did. He absolutely refused all invitations to 
great houses where his wife was not as welcome as him- 
self. He sincerely believed her to be the cleverest and 
best of women, who deserved distinction for her own 
sake. But it was all of no avail. She allowed herself to 
become frantic with jealousy, and absolutely without 
cause. Her tongue could be as satiric, as undiscriminat- 
ing, as his. For the most part she used that potent 
instrument, as Dr. Garnett says (a little unjustly, I think), 
"to narrow his sympathies, edge his sarcasms, intensify 
his negations, and foster his disdain for whatever would 
not run in his own groove." When it was turned against 
him one can imagine the result. That which strikes one 
most in reading the story is, that all the bitterness between 
them might have been avoided by a little tact, a little com- 
mon sense. But in these qualities each was deficient. 
Each was accustomed to see life through the atmosphere 
of an imagination which exaggerated into grotesqueness 
or tragedy the simplest things. Each felt the least jar 
upon the nerves as a veritable agony. Life was unques- 
tionably hard enough for them in any case, but this intense 
sensitiveness made it tenfold harder. 

Yet when all these admissions are made, we should 
take an altogether wrong impression if we supposed that 
these disagreements were normal and continuous. Not 
merely does Mrs. Carlyle's real love for Carlyle come out 



200 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

in so many direct and positive expressions, but it is admir- 
ably reflected in her humor. There may be wit, but there 
cannot be humor, without love, and the way in which she 
permits her bright and vivacious humor to play round him 
in her letters reveals not merely her genius, but her heart. 
He is her "poor babe of genius." "Between two and 
three o'clock is a very placid hour with the creature." 
"He never complains of serious things, but if his finger is 
cut, one must hold it and another get plaister." On the 
New-Year morning of 1863, Carlyle no sooner gets up 
than he discovers "that his salvation, here and hereafter, 
depended on having 'immediately, without a moment's 
delay, ' a beggarly pair of old cloth boots that the street- 
sweeper would hardly have thanked him for, 'lined with 
flannel, and new bound, and repaired generally.' " 
"Nothing in the shape of illness ever alarms Mr. C. but 
that of not eating one's regular meals." She relates with 
positive glee, and in the spirit of the brightest banter, 
innumerable episodes in which "the creature" performs 
some eccentric part; and often enough, as Mr. Moncure 
Conway has told us, these little pieces of inimitable farce 
were performed in Carlyle 's presence, and to his own 
infinite amusement. There is always a certain soup^on of 
bitterness in the banter, but it is a pleasant, and not a cor- 
rosive, bitter. She knew exactly where the trouble was 
between them; she knew that when Carlyle was exhausted 
with his immense labors, and she worn to the nerve with 
neuralgia, sleeplessness, and domestic worries, each was 
apt to rub the other the wrong way, and to magnify unin- 
tended slights into mischievous offences. She knew it, 
and was sorry for it, and would have avoided it if she 
could. "Alas, dear!" she writes, "I am very sorry for you. 



Thomas Carlyle 201 

You, as well as I, are too vivid; to you as well as me has 
a skin been given much too thin for the rough purposes of 
human life — God knows how gladly. I would be sweet- 
tempered, and cheerful-hearted, and all that sort of thing, 
for your single sake, if my temper were not soured and 
my heart saddened beyond my power to mend them." 
But though she could be neither sweet-tempered nor 
cheerful, she was always brave, bright, and sensitive to 
the humorous aspect of things. Upon the whole, one 
may doubt if any braver woman ever lived; Joan of Arc 
in her glittering armor was no more of a heroine than 
Mrs. Carlyle in that small dominion at Cheyne Row, in 
her endless strifes with servants and mechanics, her reso- 
lute sorties on the wolf of poverty that for so many years 
growled at the door, and her desperate ingenuities to make 
the path easy for her "poor babe of genius." 

The actual amount of physical and nervous suffering 
which Mrs. Carlyle endured during these years, and espe- 
cially towards the end, exceeds the total of the worst 
agony of those we call martyrs. What sadder or more 
poignant cries have ever been wrung from a human spirit 
than these.'' "Oh, my own darling, God have pity on us! 
Ever since the day after you left, whatever flattering 
accounts may have been sent you, the truth is, I have been 
wretched — perfectly wretched day and night, with that 
horrible malady. So God help me, for on earth is no 
help!" "Oh, my dear, I think how near my mother I 
am! [She was then staying at Holm Hill, not far from 
where her mother was buried.] How still I should be, 
laid beside her! But I wish to live for you, if only I 

could live out of torment I seem already to belong 

to the passed-away as much as to the present; nay, more. 



202 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

God bless you on your solitary way ! .... Oh, my dear, 
I am very weary. My agony has lasted long. I am 
tempted to take a long cry over myself — and no good will 
come of that." She expresses her sorrow for "the ter- 
rible, half-insane sensitiveness which drove me on to 
bothering you. Oh, if God would only lift my trouble off 
me so far that I could bear it all in silence, and not add 
to the troubles of others! .... I am very stupid and low. 
God can raise me up again: but will he? My dear, when 
I have been giving directions about the house, then a feel- 
ing like a great black wave will roll over my breast, and I 
say to myself, whatever pains be taken to gratify me, shall 
I ever more have a day of ease, of painlessness, or a 
night of sweet rest in that house, or in any other house 
but the dark narrow one where I shall arrive at last? Oh, 
dear! you cannot help me, though you would! Nobody 
can help me! Only God: and can I wonder if God take 
no heed of me, when I have all my life taken so little heed 
of Him?" Nor are the replies of Carlyle less pathetic. 
"My thoughts," says he, "are a prayer for my poor little 
life-partner, who has fallen lame beside me, after travel- 
ing so many steep and thorny ways My poor 

little friend of friends! she has fallen wounded to the 
ground, and I am alone — alone!" In her worst agonies 
she turns to her husband always with cries for consola- 
tion, and says: "I cannot tell how gentle and good Mr. 
Carlyle is. He is busy as ever, but he studies my com- 
fort and peace as he never did before." At the same 
time he is taking sorrowful note of the fact that she is 
more careful of his comforts than in her busiest days of 
health. Is there anywhere in literature a more pathetic 
page than this? Can there be any clearer testimony to the 



Thomas Carlyle 203 

reality and depth of that love which bound these two sorely 
tried souls together, or to the error of the general assump- 
tion that their marriage was a foolish and unhappy one? 

Pages might be written on such a theme, but all that 
can be said profitably is said when we are asked to recol- 
lect the extreme and almost morbid sensitiveness of both 
Carlyle and his wife, their common love of irony, their 
common practice of humorous exaggeration on all sub- 
jects, but especially those in which their own personalities 
were involved, and the strain upon nerve and temper 
which was imposed by years of uni'ntermittent labor and 
vain struggle. One thing is at least clear, that in their 
more serious misunderstandings they were neither in 
thought nor deed unfaithful to one another, and never 
ceased to love each other with absorbing passion. Of the 
dull, truculent, selfish brutality of temper attributed to 
Carlyle by some writers, he was utterly incapable, for he 
was the most magnanimous of men. "I could not help," 
says Emerson, on recalling his memorable visit to Carlyle 
at Craigenputtock, "congratulating him upon his treasure 
of a wife." Others who visited the Carlyles during this 
same period, when life was hardest with them, have borne 
witness that they lived with one another upon delightful 
terms. Surely, if some bitter words escaped them in the 
long struggle, it is a matter, not for wonder, but for forgive- 
ness; surely also some allowance can be made for a man 
of genius staggering beneath a burden almost too great to 
be borne, and for a woman broken in health by a most 
distressing malady, each of them, as Mrs. Carlyle con- 
fessed, "too vivid," and "with a skin much too thin for 
the rough purposes of human life." When the unwhole- 
some love of scandal, aroused by the passion which mean 



104 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

natures find in discovering the faults of the great, subsides, 
no doubt the true facts will be seen in their right per- 
spective, and blame will be exchanged for pity, censure 
for a comprehending charity. 

In the mean time we may remember that those who 
knew Carlyle the best speak most warmly of the magna- 
nimity of his character. 

The impression which Carlyle made upon his contem- 
poraries is the best comment on his character. The most 
serious men of his time recognized him as a modern John 
the Baptist, and even a worldly ecclesiastic like Bishop 
Wilberforce described him as "a most eminently religious 
man." Charles Kingsley honored him as his master, and 
has drawn an admirable portrait of him as Saunders 
Mackaye in Alton Locke, of which description Carlyle 
characteristically said that it was a "wonderfully splendid 
and coherent piece of Scotch bravura." His gospel is 
contained in Sartor Resartus, of which it has been perti- 
nently said that it "will be read as a gospel or not at all." 
A calm and penetrative critic like James Martineau wit- 
nesses to the same overwhelming religious force in Carlyle 
when he speaks of his writings as a "pentecostal power 
on the sentiments of Englishmen." On the truly poetic 
nature of his genius all the great critics have long ago 
agreed. How could it be otherwise in regard of writings 
whose every second paragraph kindles into the finest 
imaginative fire? His power of imagery is Dantesque; 
his range is truely epic; the very phrases of his diaries 
and letters are steeped in poetry, as when he speaks of 
John Sterling's last "verses, written for myself alone, as 
in star-fire and immortal tears." The testimonies to his 
power of humor, so far as his conversations are con- 



Thomas Carlyle 205 

cerned, are much too numerous for recapitulation. His 
own definition of humor was "a genial sympathy with the 
under side"; and this vivid sympathy expressed itself in 
his use of ludicrous and extraordinary metaphor, and in 
his "delicate sense of absurdity." His most volcanic 
denunciations usually "ended in a laugh, the heartiest in 
the world, at his own ferocity. Those who have not 
heard that laugh," says Mr. Allingham, "will never know 
what Carlyle's talk was." Prophet, poet, and humorist — 
so stands Carlyle before the world, a man roughly hewn 
out of the primeval earth, conceived in the womb of labor 
and hardship, yet touched with immortal fire, fashioned 
in the rarest mould of greatness, tenderness, and heroism; 
clearly the most massive, impressive, and fascinating figure 
in nineteenth-century literature. It remains for us to see 
what his writings teach us, and what is taught yet more 
forcibly by the epic of his life. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. In what respects may Carlyle be called the greatest 
genius of the nineteenth century? 

2. What did Goethe say of him? 

3. How did the nature of Carlyle's early life prove the 
sincerity of his purpose? 

4. How did Carlyle's genius differ from that of Goethe? 

5. How were his habits of expression colored by his im- 
agination? 

6. What kind of humor did Carlyle possess? 

7. Illustrate Mrs. Carlyle's use of humor of a similar kind. 

8. Why has Carlyle's domestic life been so unfortunately 
misunderstood? 

9. What real causes for suffering existed in the lives of 
these two people? 

10. What is undoubtedly the true view to be taken of the 
whole subject? 



2o6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 



» BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Thomas Caiiylc. Richard Garnett. (Great Writers Series.) 

Thomas Carlyle : .1 History of the First Forty Years of 
His Life. J. A. Froude. 

Thomas Carlyle : A History of His Life in London. J. A. 
Froude. 

Thomas Carlyle. Reminiscences, letters, correspondence 
of Carlyle and Emerson, correspondence between Goethe and 
Carlyle. Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. 

Lessons from My Masters: Carlyle, Tennyson, Rusk in. 
Peter Bayne. 

Carlyle's Complete Works (Illustrated Cabinet Edition), 
$1.50 per volume, sold separately. There are many cheap 
editions of Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero Worship, and of 
some of his essays. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

CARLYLE'S TEACHING 

Maurice once said of himself that he only had three or 
four things to say, and he felt it necessary to go on saying 
them over and over again. The same criticism might be 
passed upon Carlyle. No great writer has repeated him- 
self with such freedom and emphasis. It therefore be- 
comes a comparatively easy task to discern the main lines 
of his teaching. In whatever he wrote, whether historv 
or essay, private journals or biography, these main lines 
of thought perpetually appear, like auriferous strata, 
pushing themselves up through the soil, and indicating the 
nature of his thinking. 

The remark of Bishop Wilberforce, that Carlyle was 
an eminently religious man, gives us the true starting- 
point for any honest understanding of his teaching. Mr. 
Froude has spoken of him as a Calvinist without the 
theology, and in the main this is true. Every one knows 
the striking passage in which Carlyle tells us how Irving 
drew from him the confession that he was no longer able 
to see the truths of religion from the orthodox standpoint. 
Upon analysis this will be found to mean that he had 
definitely rejected the supernatural. He once said that 
nothing could be more certain than that the miracles, as 
they were related in the Gospels, did not and could not 
have occurred. For the church, as such, he had small 
respect, because it seemed to him to be mainly given over 

207 



2o8 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

to a hollow recitation of formula which it had really 
ceased to believe, and which no rational man ever would 
believe again with genuine sincerity. He regarded the 
efforts of Maurice to frame a rational basis for belief in 
the supernatural as the endless spinnmg of a rope of sand. 
He once pointed to Dean Stanley and said, with cutting 
sarcasm: "There goes Stanley knocking holes in the 
bottom of the Church of England." But on the other 
hand, he had more than sarcasm: he had an absolutely 
savage contempt for anything approaching atheism. Of 
Mill he spoke with bitter and habitual ridicule, although 
he recognized in him the finest friendliness of nature; of 
Darwin "as though he had robbed him." He dismissed 
the discoveries of Darwin with the scathing phrase, 
"Gorilla damnifications of humanity." He speaks of his 
"whole softened heart" going out anew in childlike utter- 
ance of the great prayer, "Our Father, who art in heaven." 
While he cannot believe the Gospei miracles, he neverthe- 
less teaches that the world itself is nothing less than one 
vast standing miracle. No saint or prophet ever spoke 
with a surer faith of that great Yonder, to which he 
believes his father is gathered, and where he and all whom 
he loves will some day be reunited in some new intimacy 
of infinite love. He scruples even to use the name of 
God, inventing paraphrases of it because he feels it is too 
great and holy for common utterance. A profound belief 
in Providence governed all his estimates of life, and prayer 
was with him a habit and an urgent duty, since it was the 
lifting up of the heart to the Infinite above, which answered 
to the Infinite within. 

Now, nothing can well appear more contradictory than 
these statements, and they can only be harmonized by the 



Carlyle's Teaching 209 

recollection of one fact, viz., that in Carlyle emotion out- 
ran reason, and what was impossible to the pure intellect 
was constantly accepted on the testimony of his spiritual 
intuitions. The merely theological conclusions of Calvin 
he absolutely rejected, but the essence of Calvinism ran 
like a subtle spirit through his whole nature. What he 
really aimed at was to show that religion rested on no 
external evidences at all, but on the indubitable intuitions 
of the human soul. He would not even take the trouble 
to set about proving that there was a God; he would have 
agreed with Addison that the man who said that he did 
not believe in a God was an impudent liar and knew it. 
He was angrily contemptuous of Renan's Life of Jesus, 
although Renan probably said nothing more than he him- 
self believed; but he felt a reverence for Christ which 
revolted from Renan's method of statement, and he said 
that his life of Christ was something that never ought to 
be written at all. Thus it becomes more necessary with 
Carlyle than with any other writer of our time to distin- 
guish sharply between his opinions and his convictions. 
In point of fact, he wrote on religion, as on all other sub- 
jects, from the standpoint of the poet rather than of the 
scholar or the philosopher. Driven back upon his defences, 
Calvin himself could not have spoken with more lucidity 
and passion of his primary religious beliefs than Carlyle. 
The Shorter Catechism had passed into the very blood and 
marrow of his nature. In the bare house at Ecclefechan the 
"Cottar's Saturday Night" was a veritable fact, and from 
the Puritan mould of his childhood he never escaped. He 
never wished to do so. He sought rather to distill the 
finer essences of Calvinism afresh, and in a great measure 
he did so. His real creed was Calvinism shorn of its logic 



2IO Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and interpenetrated with emotion. He translated it into 
poetry and touched it with the iridescent glow and color 
of transcendentalism. He separated what he considered 
its accidental and formal elements from the essential, and 
to those essential and imperishable elements he gave a 
new authority and currency by the impact of his own 
astonishing genius. 

What were these elements.'' As restated by Carlyle, 
they were belief in God as the certainty of certainties on 
which all human life is built; of a God working in history, 
and revealing Himself in no mere collection of books, but 
in all events; of all work as perenially noble and beauti- 
ful, because it was God's appointed task; of duty and 
morality as the only real prerogatives of man ; of sincerity 
and honesty as the chief achievements which God de- 
manded of man, and the irreducible minimum of any 
honorable human life. The world was no mere mill, turn- 
ing its wheels mechanically in the Time-floods, without 
any Overseer, but a Divinely appointed world, and to 
know that was the chief element of all knowledge. Man 
was not a mechanism, but an organism; not a "patent 
digesting machine," but a divinely fashioned creature. 
The everlasting Yea was to admit this; the everlasting No 
to deny it. "On the roaring billows of Time thou art not 
engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love 
not pleasure: love God. This is the everlasting Yea, 
wherein all contradiction is solved, wherein whoso walks 
and works it is well with him. Even to the greatest that 
has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God- 
announcing, even as under simpler figures to the simplest 
and the least? The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the 
rudely jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into 



Carlyle's Teaching 211 

separate firmaments; deep, silent rock- foundations are 
built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting 
luminaries above; instead of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we 
have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World." 

To believe this, according to Carlyle, implied a species 
of conversion, and of his own conversion, when these 
things suddenly became real to him one night in Leith 
Walk, he has left as circumstantial an account as we have 
of the conversion of Luther or Wesley. What it implies 
is, in effect, a certain reconciliation to God, to the world, 
and to one's self, Carlyle's intense sympathy with Crom- 
well, which has made him his best biographer, arises from 
the fact that he found in Cromwell an echo of his own 
thoughts and a picture of his own experiences. When 
Cromwell said, "What are all events but God working?" 
we readily feel that the very accent of the thought is Car- 
lyle's. When Cromwell steadies his trembling hand and 
says, "A governor should die working," he expresses 
Carlyle's gospel of work in its finest form. When Crom- 
well talks of dwelling in Kedar and Meshech, where no 
water is, and of passing through strange hours of black- 
ness and darkness, he is talking entirely after the manner 
of Carlyle. After that memorable experience in Leith 
Walk, Carlyle tells us, his mood was no longer despond- 
ence, but valorous defiance. The world, at least, had no 
further power to hurt or hinder him: is he not now sure 
that he lives and moves at the bidding of a divine task- 
master.? Long afterwards^ when his first draft of the 
French Revolution was burned, this faith in the mystery 
of God's ordering was his one source of solace. "It is 
as if my invisible schoolmaster had torn my copy-book 
when I showed it, and said, 'No, boy! thou must write 



212 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

it better.' What can I, sorrowing, do but obey — obey 
and think it the best? To work again; and oh! may God 
be with me, for this earth is not friendly. On in His 
name! I was the nearest being happy sometimes these 
last few days that I have been for months!" To be 
reconciled to himself meant in such circumstances that he 
was willing to work, even if nothing came of his work, 
since work in itself was the appointed duty and true glory 
of man. "Produce! Produce! were it but the pitifuUest 
infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's 
name. 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, 
then. Up! up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do 
it with thy whole might. Work while it is called to-day; 
for the night cometh wherein no man can work." Not, 
perhaps, a hopeful or a cheering creed this; but at all 
events a strenuous and a noble one. Such as it is, it con- 
tains the substance of Carlyle's contribution to religious 
thought. And we may profitably remember that the true 
effect and grandeur of a creed is not to be measured by 
its dimensions, but by its intensity. We do not need large 
creeds for high lives, but we do need deep convictions, 
and Carlyle believed his creed and lived by it with pas- 
sionate sincerity. 

I have said that this is not a hopeful creed, nor was 
Carlyle ever a hopeful prophet. He called himself a 
Radical of the quiet order, but he had none of the hope- 
fulness of Radicalism, nor was it in him to be quiet on any 
subject that interested him. There is a good deal of truth 
in the ironical remark of Maurice, that Carlyle believed in 
a God who left off governing the world at the death of 
Oliver Cromwell. He saw nothing in modern progress 
that justified its boasts, and it must be owned that his 



Carlyle's Teaching 213 

social forecasts have been all too amply fulfilled. The 
hopefulness of Emerson positively angered him. He took 
him round London, showing him the worst of its many 
abominations, asking after each had been duly objurgated, 
"Do you believe in the Devil now?" His very reverence 
for work led him to reverence any sort of great worker, 
irrespective of the positive results of his energy. It led 
him into the mistake of glorifying Frederick the Great. 
It led him into the still greater error of defenchng Dr. 
Francia, the dictator of Paraguay. So far as the first 
article of the Radical faith goes, a belief in the people 
and the wisdom of majorities, he was a hardened un- 
behever. Yet it was not because he did not sympathize 
with the people. His rapid and brilliant etchings of 
laboring folk— the poor drudge, son of a race of drudges, 
with bowed shoulders and broken finger-nails, whom he 
sees in Burges; the poor Irishman "in Piccadilly, blue- 
visaged, thatched in rags, a blue child on each arm: 
hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may 
devour" — are full of tenderness and compassion. He 
never forgot that he himself was the child of laboring folk, 
and he spoke for his order. But he had no mind to hand 
over the government of the nation to the drudges. His 
theory of government was government by great men, by 
which he meant strong men. History was to him at bottom 
the story of great men at work. He beheved in individual- 
ism to the last degree when government was in question. 
If a man had the power to rule, it was his right to be a 
ruler, and those who had not the power should be glad and 
thankful to obey. If they would not obey, the one remedy 
was the Napoleonic "whiff of grapeshot," or something 
akin to it, and in this case Might was the divinest Right, 



214 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Yet this is very far from being all Carlyle's political 
gospel. He advocated emigration, and by systematic 
emigration a dimly formulated scheme of imperial feder- 
ation, long before these things were discussed by poli- 
ticians. His denunciations of competition really paved 
the way for the great schemes of co-operation which have 
since been effected. More or less he believed that the 
great remedy for poverty was to get back to the land. 
"Captains of industry" was his suggestive phrase, by 
which he indicated the organization of labor. His ap- 
peals to the aristocracy to be a true aristocracy of work, 
alive to their social duties, and justly powerful because 
nobly wise, were certainly not unregarded. Much that 
we call socialism to-day had its real origin in the writings 
of Carlyle. The condition of the people was with him a 
burning and tremendous question. It was not within the 
range of his powers to suggest much in the way of prac- 
tical measures; his genius was not constructive. The 
function of the prophet has always been rather to expose 
an evil than to provide a remedy. It must be admitted 
that Carlyle's denunciations are more convincing than his 
remedies. But they had one effect whose magnitude is 
immeasurable: they roused the minds of all thinking men 
throughout England to the real state of affairs, and created 
the new paths of social reform. The blazing vehemence 
of his style, the intense vividness of his pictures, could 
not fail to arrest attention. He shattered forever the 
hypocrisy that went by the name of "unexampled pros- 
perity." He forced men to think. In depicting the social 
England of his time, he "splashed" great masses of color 
on his canvas, as he did in describing the French Revolu- 
tion, and all earnest men were astonished into attention. 



Carlyle's Teaching 215 

The result has been, as Dr. Garnett puts it, that "opinion 
has in the main followed the track pointed out by Carlyle's 
luminous finger"; and a completer testimony to his politi- 
cal prescience could not be desired. 

Much must be allowed for Carlyle's love of paradox in 
the statement of these truths. Fundamentally, it is the 
exaggeration of the humorist who, in his habitual ironies, 
is half-conscious that he caricatures himself as well as his 
opponents. No doubt it would have been very helpful to 
persons of slow understanding if he had always spoken 
with logical gravity, and had strictly defined and stated 
what he meant. But then he would have been as dull as 
they are. The half-dozen truths which he had to teach 
are as common as copy-book headlines, and as depressing. 
Put in plain and exact English, they are things which 
everybody knows, and is willing to accept theoretically, 
however little he is disposed to act upon them. The 
supreme merit of Carlyle is, that he sets these common- 
places on fire by his vehemence, and vitalizes them by his 
humor. It is the humor of Carlyle that keeps his writ- 
ings fresh. His nicknames stick when his argument is 
forgotten. In his hands political economy itself ceases to 
be a dismal science, and becomes a manual of witty meta- 
phors. This is so great an achievement that we may 
readily forgive his frequent inconsequence, and what is 
worse, his unfairness and exaggeration of statement. 

To this it may be added, that where Carlyle was con- 
vinced of any unfairness of statement, or unneedful 
acerbity of temper, no one showed a quicker or nobler 
magnanimity in apology. His bark was always worse 
than his bite. We read his ferocious attacks on oppo- 
nents, or his satiric descriptions of persons, in cool blood. 



2i6 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and do not hear that genial laugh which wound up many 
similar vituperations in his conversation, and drew their 
sting. For all his angry counsel to whip drones and shoot 
rogues, Mrs. Carlyle tells us that when she read aloud to 
him the account of the execution of the assassin Buranelli, 
"tears rolled down Carlyle 's cheeks — he who talks of 
shooting Irishmen who will not work." He was lament- 
ably wrong in his judgment of the great issues involved in 
the American Civil War; but when, years afterwards, 
Mrs. Charles Lowell, whose son had fallen in the war, 
visited him, he took her by her hand, and said, even with 
tears, "I doubt I have been mistaken." Amid all his 
bright derision and savage mockery, no one can fail to see 
that he sought for and loved truth alone. That was, and 
will always remain, his crowning honor. He sought it, 
and was loyal to it, when he turned sadly from the minis- 
try for which he was destined, when he went into the 
wilderness of Craigenputtock, when he was content to be 
ostracized by Jeffrey and his clique as an intellectual 
Ishmael, when he finally came to London and took up his 
real life work, content to starve, if needs be, but resolved 
to speak or write no word that should win him bread or 
fame at the price of insincerity. And in the hearts of 
thousands of men, and among them the best and ablest 
of his time, he begot the same temper. Kingsley, Ster- 
ling, Ruskin, and a score of others gathered to his stan- 
dard, not to name the throng of humbler disciples in every 
walk of life who caught the inspiration of his passion, 
and reinterpreted his thoughts. This was the work he 
did for England; amid manifold shams and hypocrisies 
he stood fast by the truth, for it was to bear witness to 
the truth that he was born, and came into the world. 



Carlyle's Teaching 217 



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. Why is it comparatively easy to discern the main Hnes 
of Carlyle's teaching? 

2. What difficulty did he find with the religious beliefs of 
his time? 

3. How did he feel toward anything like atheism? 

4. What was his own attitude toward God? 

5. How did his opinions sometimes differ from his con- 
victions? 

6. What were the chief elements of Carlyle's creed? 

7. How does his life of Cromwell reflect his own experi- 
ences? 

8. How did he meet the tragic destruction of his work on 
the French Revolution? 

g. How was he impressed by the social conditions of his 
own times? 

10. What was his idea of the rule of the strong? 

11. How did he trv to right the social v/rongs of his day? 

12. How did his gifts of style help him in putting the plain 
truth? 

13. How did his one great purpose in life make him mag- 
nanimous when he erred as well as heroic in the face of ob- 
stacles? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Letters and Memorials of Jane IVelsJi Carlyle. By J. A. 
Froude. 

Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Mrs. Alexander Ireland. 

In Carlyle's Country : A Sunday in Cheyne Row. John 
Burroughs, in " Fresh Fields." 

Some Aspects of Poetry. (Prose Poets — Carlyle.) J. C. 
Shairp, 

Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith. 
(Carlyle.) R. H. Hutton. 

My Sttidy Windows. (Carlyle.) James Russell Lowell. 

Miscellanies. Vol. I. John Morley. 

Three Great Teachers of Our Own Time. A. H. Japp. 



CHAPTER XIX 

JOHN RUSKIN 

Born in London, Februarys, 1819. Took his degree at Oxford, 
1842. First volume of Modern Painters published, 1843. 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849. The Stones of Venice, 
1851-1853. The Two Paths, 1854. The Elements of Draw- 
ing, 1857. The Elements of Perspective, 1859. Among his 
most popular smaller books are: The Crown of Wild Olive, 
Sesame and the Lilies, The Queen of the Air, Ethics of the 
Dust, Until This Last, which he has called his best work. 
Fors Clavigera, a series of letters, published with index, 
1887. Died at Coniston, January 20, 1900. This and the 
following chapters were written during the life of Ruskin, 
and the phraseology has not been altered. 

It is the prophetic force of Carlyle which is his most 
remarkable qtiality, as we have seen, and the secret of his 
abiding influence; it is also the primal and distinctive gift 
of Ruskin. In poetry, Wordsworth and Shelley represent 
this force; in history, Carlyle; in social economics, Rus- 
kin. The prophet is the summed-up soul and conscience 
of a community, the emblem and the fountain of its moral 
life. He derives nothing from convention; he speaks out 
of his own strength and originality of nature, with the 
vehemence, and even anger, of great convictions, and with 
an amplitude of utterance which scorns details in its pas- 
sion for principles. It is above all things his business to 
see; then to speak of what he sees with unfaltering sin- 
cerity, addressing hmiself to his fellows in such a way as 

21S 



John Ruskin 219 

to reveal to them their own deticiencies; finally to inspire 
in them a desire of reformation, and of all noble progress 
and accomplishment. This has been the lifelong mission 
of Ruskin. 

It has been, however, a mission very much misappre- 
hended. Tolstoi has affirmed that Ruskin is one of the 
greatest men of the age, and has said that it pained him 
to notice that English people generally were of a different 
opinion. The fact of the matter is, that England has 
never quite known how to take Ruskin. 

He presents a character of so many subtleties and vari- 
ations, so tremulously poised between common sense and 
eccentricity, so clear and firm in outline, yet touched with 
such deceptive lights and shadows, and capable of such 
extraordinary transformations, that average opinion has 
preferred to accept him as a great stylist rather than a 
great man. He is by turns reactionary and progressive, 
simple and shrewd, a mystic and a man of practical affairs. 
He has bewildered men by the very brilliance of his ver- 
satility. No sooner has the world owned him as the 
prince of art critics than he sets up as the exponent of a 
new political economy. He will show us how to weave 
cloth honestly as well as to draw truly; how to build char- 
acter, as a matter of greater import even than the building 
of a Venice; and he who is an authority on Botticelli must 
needs also be an authority on drains. He links together 
in the strangest fashion the remotest things- — philosophy 
and agriculture, theology and sanitation, the manner of a 
man's life and the quality of his pictures. It is this very 
variety and exuberance of mind which has kept the esti- 
mate of his genius low among his countrymen. They 
have not been able to follow the nimbleness of his thought. 



220 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

and to perceive that, eccentric as it seems, it moves in a 
precisely ordered orbit. The last thing that the English 
reader would say of Ruskin is, that he sees life steadily, 
and he sees it whole; yet that is the very thing that 
Tolstoi would say of him, and he would add that therein 
lies his claim to be a great man. 

And in such a contention Tolstoi would be right; the 
cardinal fact about Ruskin is, that he sees Hfe steadily and 
sees it whole. This is the explanation of the immense 
variety of theme in his writings; it springs from width of 
vision. If he had seen life only in some one special aspect, 
as for example, in its relation to art alone, which is com- 
monly supposed to be his one function, the critics would 
at once have known how to rank him. There would have 
been no hesitation as to the place that was his by right. 
But when he links art with morality, when he sets himself 
to the discovery of the principles by which art is great, 
and finds them to be also' the only verified principles by 
which life is also great, then criticism becomes purblind 
and embarrassed. It was prepared to praise the critic of 
art, but the critic of life is a very different matter. Hence 
there arises the natural tendency on the part of the reader 
to regard the opinions of Ruskin as eccentric, but their 
expression as perfect — to value him as a master of hterary 
expression, but not as a teacher — to agree, in point of 
fact, that he is a great writer, but to deny the contention 
of Tolstoi that he is a great man. It is only going a step 
further to say of him, as it was said of Goldsmith, who 
"wrote like an angel, but talked like a poor poll," that 
Ruskin writes nonsense, but writes it beautifully. That 
this is the general opinion of English readers, no one 
would venture to say; but having regard to the general 



John Ruskin 221 

praise of the beauty of his style, and the general contempt 
of the social principles he enunciates, one can see without 
difficulty what it is Tolstoi meant when he called him a 
great man, and deplored that his countrymen held a differ- 
ent opinion. 

The personal history of Ruskin is the history of his 
writings. No youth ever began life with less likehhood 
of prophetic development. He was the petted if not 
spoiled child of wealthy parents. He begins his long use 
of the pen by the production of merely pretty and con- 
ventional poems. He writes with the certainty of parental 
praise, and without the fear of parental or any other 
criticism. He has absolutely no acquaintance with the 
hard facts of life, such as drove the iron deep into the 
soul of Carlyle, and taught him to become both law and 
impulse to himself. No youth ever stood in greater dan- 
ger of a life of mere dilettanteism. There was no urgency 
to win his bread laid upon him, no special preparation 
for any profession, no diligent training with a view to the 
toils or the prizes of a career. His chief tastes are, a love 
of nature, carefully fed by early and extensive travel; a 
love of books, developed by the best examples; and a love 
of art, which his possession of means enabled him to 
gratify. We do not gather from any record of his early 
life which we possess any sense of great robustness either 
of mind or body. His youth was threatened by consump- 
tion, and his mind was delicate and sensitive rather than 
profound or energetic. There is even the trace of effemi- 
nacy in this early Ruskin, the quite natural and innocent 
effeminacy of a childhood sheltered from the rough winds 
of life, and of a youth that flowers into manhood, not by 
the conquest of a barren soil, but by the sedulous assist- 



222 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

ance of exotic horticulture. As compared with Carlyle, 
with whom he stands most closely associated, Ruskin 
grows in a hothouse, while Carlyle is a product of wild 
moor and bleak hillside. The one is the child of wealth, 
the other of poverty ; the one has a nature rich and varied, 
the other remains to the last stern and narrow as the land 
that bore him. Any more unlikely environment for a 
prophet than Ruskin's it would be difficult, and perhaps 
impossible, to imagine. 

But one gift Ruskin had — the rare and superb gift of 
fearless sincerity, and it was this gift that saved him from 
the perils of dilettanteism and became the dominant force 
in the shaping of his life and genius. He had also a mind 
of the keenest analytic cjuality, and an imagination alike 
virile and sensitive. It was natural that in such an en- 
vironment as his, his genius should fix itself first of all 
upon the study of art. What was art? Was it merely 
a pleasant adornment of luxurious life, or was it in 
itself an expression of life.'' Was its true aim pleas- 
ure or truth? Ruskin speedily decided that art was 
serious, and not frivolous, that it had a vital connection 
with national character, and that its one great mission was 
truth. He began to train himself with infinite industry 
and assiduity, that he might be in a position to judge of 
art with justice and knowledge. He resolved to be led by 
no traditions, but simply to allow his sincerity of temper 
unimpeded play, and to abide by the result. The discov- 
ery of the germ in which all his future teaching of art lay 
was made almost by accident. He had been taught in 
sketching foliage to generalize it, and to arrange it by 
arbitrary rules and on an artificial method. One day he 
sketched for himself a tree stem with ivy leaves upon it, 



John Ruskin 223 

and instantly perceived "liow much finer it was as a piece 
of design than any conventional rearrangement would be." 
All the rules of artificial art in which he had been trained 
perished in that simple discovery. He saw then that the 
only rule of any importance to the artist was, "Be sincere 
with Nature, and take her as she is, neither casually glan- 
cing at her 'effects,' nor dully laboring at her parts with 
the intention of improving and blending them into some- 
thing better, but taking her all in all. On the other hand, 
be sincere with yourself, knowing what you truly admire 
and painting that, refusing the hyprocrisy of any 'grand 
style' or 'high art,' just as much as you refuse to pander 
to vulgar tastes. And then vital art is produced, and if 
the workman be a man of great powers, great art." He 
had found a domain which hitherto no prophet had claimed 
or touched. The mere painting of pictures, which to men 
of a narrower mind, a less refined training, or a more 
Puritan temper might have seemed a superfluity of luxuri- 
ous life, without relation to the more serious principles of 
conduct or the progress of society, he perceived to be an 
essential element of life and an infallible witness to charac- 
ter. He had discovered "that art, no less than other 
spheres of life, had its heroes; that the mainspring of 
their energy was sincerity, and the burden of their utter- 
ance truth." 

In its moral aspects this principle is but a rediscovery 
of the principle of Milton, that a true poet must make his 
life a poem. It sounds a commonplace, only we have 
need to remember that nothing is so original as a com- 
monplace when it is genuinely believed. But it was not a 
commonplace as Ruskin uttered it, either to himself or the 
world he sought to instruct; so far from this was it, that 



224 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

it was felt to be the enunciation of a new and revolution- 
ary principle. Art was in those days in peril of becoming 
a mere handicraft. Its rules were as the laws of the 
Medes and Persians, which altered not. Given so many 
rules, you produced a picture with the mathematical cer- 
tainty by which two and two make four. Mediocre pic- 
tures were produced in endless progression, each as like to 
each as though they had been turned out of a factory. 
The greatest and most inspired artist of his day, Turner, 
was the object of rancorous ridicule, because he was out- 
raging the pedantic traditions of artificial picture-making. 
Ruskin recalled men to nature in art as Wordsworth did 
in poetry. He laid clown the rule that it was the business 
of the artist to study nature with humbleness and docility, 
"rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning noth- 
ing." He laid down the yet harder rule that the character 
of the artist has more to do with the making of his art 
than the deftness of his hand; that a picture is the record 
of a soul, as truly as of some fragment of natural phe- 
nomena; the rule of Milton, in fact, that the true poem is 
the product of the true life, and that great art is impossible 
to the man of mean soul. On those two principles all the 
art criticism of Ruskin is based. The principle of the 
return to nature made him the champion of Turner against 
the world; and later on led him to the discovery of the 
pre-Raphaehtes, and the counsel "to paint things as they 
probably did look and happen, not as, by the rules of art 
developed under Raphael, they might be supposed grace- 
fully, deliciously, or sublimely to have happened." The 
principle of character as the true secret of art led him to 
the much wider field of his later literary labors, and the 
fulfillment of his true prophetic mission. 



John Ruskin 225 

I have associated, and in part contrasted, Ruskin with 
Carlyle, and it is a contrast which he himself sanctions, 
since he has declared that Carlyle was his master, and that 
all his thinking has been colored by Carlyle's stronger 
thought. At first sight the comparison seems unsustained 
and impossible, for the differences between the two men 
are clear to the most casual observation. The genius of 
Ruskin is subtle, while Carlyle lacks subtlety; the style 
of Carlyle is chaotic, while Ruskin's is polished to the 
utmost nicety of expression; Carlyle despised art, and 
Ruskin adored it; Carlyle is above all things a humorist, 
while Ruskin has wit and satire, but no humor. Each 
has vast powers of pugnacity; but Carlyle hurls the 
thunderbolt, while Ruskin wields the rapier. One has 
the energy of a primeval man, and his limitations; the 
other is the fine product of a special culture. Yet in 
moral temper they are alike, and their criticism of life 
agrees. Each teaches, as a fundamental truth, that the 
first duty of man is to take care of facts, and that prin- 
ciples will take care of themselves. Each delights in 
broad and vivid generalization. Each is in violent antago- 
nism to the main trend of the age, and states the ground of 
his revolt with violence. It was by the mere accident of 
environment that Ruskin spent the first eagerness of his 
genius on a theme that Carlyle could never regard as 
serious; criticism of art was from the very first, with 
him, criticism of life; and as his genius grew, art fell 
behind him, and life became more and more. 

How Ruskin has preached the gospel of sincerity with 
a force inferior only to Carlyle's, and with a penetrating 
beauty of phrase all his own, we shall see as we turn to 
his works. In the mean time we should remember that. 



226 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

however wrong-headed he may seem to those who do not 
agree with him, he has practiced his principles, and main- 
tained from first to last an uncompromising sincerity. He 
championed Turner, and bought his pictures, when Turner 
was utterly neglected by both the patron and the public. 
He praised work, and no more laborious life than his has 
been lived among us. He insists on a mastery of facts, 
and no artist ever put himself through a more strenuous 
discipline to facts than Ruskin, before he considered him- 
self competent to pronounce judgment on the humblest 
picture. He has advocated a wise simplicity of life, and 
few lives have been more gracefully austere than his. No 
duty has been too humble, if commended by a sense of 
right; no generosity too great, if it served a wise purpose 
or a public need. It is the least part of his benefactions 
that of the two hundred thousand pounds left him by his 
father every penny has long ago been given away. He 
has given what is more than money — himself, his genius, 
sympathy, and service, as a willing sacrifice to his country- 
men; and thus the gospel of sincerity proclaimed in his 
writings has been made still more beautiful and convincing 
by his life. 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What is the mission of a prophet as illustrated in the 
case of Ruskin? 

2. Why has Ruskin frequently bewildered his English 
readers? 

3. Why do others hold that he " sees life steadily and sees 
it whole "? 

4. Compare his early life with that of Carlyle. 

5. What qualities had he which saved him from the perils 
of a life of ease? 



John Ruskin 227 

6. What view of art did he develop as the result of his in- 
terest in the subject? 

7. What was the condition of art in England at this time? 

8. In what respects are Carlyle and Ruskin different and 
in what alike? 

9. Show how Ruskin practiced what he preached. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Prceterita. Outlhics of My Past Life. John Ruskin. 

Life and Works of foJm Ruskin. W. G. Collingwood. 2 
vols. 

fo/in Ruskin : His Life and Teachings. J. Marsha 11 Mather. 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning. Anne Thack- 
eray Ritchie. 



CHAPTER XX 
THE TEACHING OF RUSKIN 

To arrive at an estimate of Ruskin's temperament is 
easy; of the nature and scope of his teaching and phil- 
osophy much may be said. In his art criticism we liave 
seen that Ruskin lays down the great principle that sincer- 
ity is the mainspring of the artist's energy, and the burden 
of his message is truth. It may be said that such a defi- 
nition precisely expresses his own temper. But this is by 
no means an inclusive definition. He insists also with 
Keats, that truth is beauty, beauty is truth; and that the 
true artist, while not ignoring the facts of ugliness, will 
feel his passion going out perpetually toward the fairest 
forms and richest aspects of things. And it follows still 
further, that if truth is beauty, then falsehood is ugliness; 
and wherever there exist things that are repulsive and dis- 
gusting, it is because of some outrage on truth, or some 
fundamental error which an exacter conception of truth 
would have prevented. 

It needs no great wit to see that such a conclusion as 
this involves every species of social and moral question. 
Let it be applied in the direction of art itself, and we per- 
ceive at once that where we have a weakly sensational or 
a morally degraded art — where we have even less than 
this, an art which is not indeed a moral offence, but is 
artificial and mechanical, destitute of high imagination 
and feeling, wrong in its ideals and misguided in its 



The Teaching of Ruskin 22,9 

methods — it is simply because of a fault or deficiency in 
the artist. What is that fault? It is lack of truth and 
nobleness of moral temper. The greatest artists have not 
always been good or religious men, but they have been 
noble-minded men. Their more perfect vision of beauty 
is the natural result of their pro founder love of truth. 
The lower school of Dutch art is denounced by Ruskin on 
this very ground; it lacks beauty entirely because the 
artists lacked the fine sense of truth. They can paint the 
coarse revels of the tavern with a certain gross realism, 
but if they had been less of tavern roysterers themselves, 
they would have had higher visions of truth, and so would 
have painted things that were beautiful instead of things 
that are repulsive. It was because they had no thoughts 
that give them any noble pleasure, that they relied on 
sensation rather than imagination for the materials of their 
art. On the other hand, the great Italian masters were 
men of a noble moral temper; they saw the higher aspects 
of truth, and for that reason they also reached a pecu- 
liarly noble ideal of beauty. Bad art, therefore, means 
either a bad age or an ignobly minded artist; or it may 
mean both — an age that is itself too gross to attain any high 
vision of truth, or to desire it, and an artist who is the 
product of his age, and acts in conformity with it. 

Under one of Fra Angelico's pictures is inscribed the 
sentence, " Painted at rest, praying." Those who look at 
the picture are scarcely in need of such an explanation. 
There is an infinite peace and spiritual fervor in the pic- 
ture; it seems to have captured in its rich color a radiance 
that is not of this world, and it is the expression not merely 
of the great technical qualities of the artist, but also of 
the devoutness of his soul, and the virile purity and reach 



230 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

of his imagination. And this is not an inapt illustration 
of the truth that Ruskin enforces continually in his art 
teaching. To produce a great picture, it is necessary not 
merely for the artist to prepare his canvas, but to prepare 
himself. If a picture is not great, it is because the artist 
lacks moral and spiritual fiber; and no knowledge of tech- 
nique, or laborious dexterity of hand, can cover this defi- 
ciency. Beauty of a mechanical or tumultuous kind there 
may be, but never the highest form of beauty without the 
noblest passion for truth. 

Let this principle be applied to the general aspects of 
national life, and it is equally penetrative and infallible. 
Let it be assumed that English cities of the manufacturing 
type are squalid and repulsive; that they have no fine 
order or regulated beauty of arrangement; that they have 
no noble public buildings; or if they have them, they are 
hidden away behind grimy ranges of mean tenements, so 
that their total effect cannot be realized or discovered — 
and it will be found that this outward ugliness is the 
natural witness to a general contempt of truth. It is 
generally assumed that Ruskin 's violently expressed cen- 
sure of the ignoble grime of manufacturing towns springs 
from a violent hatred of manufacture. On the contrary, 
he himself has established manufactures, and praises with 
Carlyle the great "captains of industry." But what he 
says is, that there is no natural association between manu- 
facture and ugliness, and there need be none. If there 
be a notorious violation of beauty, it is because there has 
been a notorious contempt for truth. What truth? The 
truth that man lives not by bread alone; that the soul has 
claims as well as the stomach; that to make money is in 
itself the ignoblest of pursuits; and that where money is 



The Teaching of Ruskiii 231 

made by the sacrifice of men, it is more wicked than war, 
because more dehberately cruel. If there had been any due 
and real sense of the claims of the soul, as infinitely superior 
to the claims of the stomach, England would not have per- 
mitted her manufactures to thrive by the destruction of all 
that refines and ennobles those by whose toil this enor- 
mous wealth is created. If English cities are ugly, if 
there is not one of them, nor altogether, capable of giving 
so much delight to the eye as the meanest mediaeval Italian 
town could furnish, it is because we have been too ab- 
sorbed in the ignoble haste to be rich to care for anything 
but the conditior. of our bank-books. It is not manufac- 
tures that are wrong, but the spirit in which they are con- 
ducted. Those who administer them have notoriously 
departed from truth in the essential methods of their 
administration. They have not sought to provide an 
honest article for an honest wage. They have had no 
pride in their work, but only a base pleasure in its rewards. 
They have not asked, "Is this thing that I have made as 
sound and efficient a thing as it is possible for me to pro- 
duce?" but "Have I produced something that will pay, 
and something calculated cunningly to deceive the eye, so 
that I may obtain a larger payment for it than I have 
justly earned or have any right to expect?" No wonder 
manufacturing towns are ugly and squalid when they are 
governed and created by men of this spirit; how could 
you reasonably expect them to be beautiful? There has 
been a contempt for truth, and there is a corresponding 
contempt for beauty. Before England can be a land of 
beautiful cities, it must be renewed in its ideals, and must 
regain that reverence for truth which it has lost. 

The only final strength is rightness, says Ruskin; and 



23^ Literary Leaders of Modern England 

excellence, whether of art or of character, can only be 
achieved by an unswerving fidelity to right. A contempt 
of beauty means more than a lack of cesthetic taste in a 
man's nature: it means necessarily a contempt of right, 
since beauty is the conciete final expression of rightness. 
Venice rose from the sea in stern yet exquisite grandeur 
of form, because the race that laid its stones deep in the 
shallow waters of the lagoons were for centuries a great 
and noble race, disciplined into strenuous hardihood by 
the nature of their perilous position, virtuous by their 
passion for liberty, great in soul by their reverence for 
truth. The period of their decline is marked in the cor- 
ruption of their architecture, and the dream of beauty 
lessens as the people wax debased. It is useless, says 
Ruskin, to ask for men like Tintoret or churches like St. 
Mark's in a day when manufacture prospers by jugglery, 
and trade is an organized deceit; we ask for the blossom 
on the tree, forgetting that its stem is cut, and its root 
withered. You will get sound workmanship in no depart- 
ment of life when honesty and truth have ceased to com- 
mand respect; and since beauty is rightness, you will not 
get beauty either. The jerry-builder is simply the natural 
and inevitable product of an avaricious and corrupt age. 
He is the parasite of a decaying civilization, at once 
springing from the decay and propagating it. Had 
Venice been built by men whose one passion was money, 
and whose one evil gift was a minute and absolute mastery 
of the art of cheating, we should have had a stucco St. 
Mark's, which long ago had sunk unregretted in the tides 
from which it rose. An unstable people does not build 
stable and enduring works, but after its kind, unstable 
erections, only meant to last as long as money can be 



The Teaching of Ruskin i^^ 

made by them. The age of cathedral building was natu- 
rally the age when belief in God was an intelligible factor 
in human conduct, and when the imaginations of men 
were fed by solemn and eternal visions of truth. But 
when we build churches we build them by contract, 
accepting the lowest tender, and we are utterly indifferent 
to the quality of the work, so long as we get something 
showy for our money. All the bad building that goes on 
in our civic centers is therefore, like the bad art of our 
time, simply the outward witness to an inward corruption 
of the conscience. There is only one remedy, says Rus- 
kin: "No religion that ever was preached on this earth of 
God's rounding will proclaim any salvation to sellers of 
bad goods. If the ghost that is in you, whatever the 
essence of it, leaves your hand a juggler's and your heart 
a cheat's, it is not a Holy Ghost, be assured of that. 
And for the rest, all political economy, as well as all 
higher virtue, depends first on sound work." 

To obtain, therefore, fine art or noble architecture, 
according" to the gospel of Ruskin, means an entire reor- 
ganization of commerce, and a renewal of the whole nation 
in righteousness. And this means a renewal in honesty, 
a word whose meaning is almost lost in the dim-sighted- 
ness bred of universal chicanery and fraud. Thus, by 
what is after all no feat of intellectual acrobatics, but a 
calmly reasoned and intelligent process, Ruskin passes 
from the consideration of the ethics of art and architec- 
ture to the creation of a new and radical political economy. 

What, then, is the chief burden of Ruskin's ethical and 
social teaching? He lays down, first of all, the absolute 
duty of work, and of work which, as far as possible, 
absorbs the full interest, and excites the inventive faculty 



234 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

of the worker. The great evil of modern civilization is 
"not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure 
in the work by which they make their bread, and ther ore 
look to wealth as the only means of pleasure." Now, the 
workmen who built St. Mark's, or any great English 
cathedral, were, beyond doubt, far worse fed than our 
modern workmen; but their work was a pleasure to them, 
because they put into it such intelligence of soul as they 
possessed, and therefore it is good and stable work. The 
general thirst for wealth really means, therefore, a dis- 
taste for honest labor, and the resolve to escape labor by 
the readiest means in our power. But why has the work- 
man no pleasure in his work? Partly because we have 
destroyed the possibility of pleasure by what we call 
division of labor, and so rendered the exercise of thought 
and intelligence unnecessary. "It is not, truly speaking, 
the labor which is divided, but the men: divided into mere 
segments of men — broken into small fragments and 
crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence 
that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, 
but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head 
of a nail." This is really the ground of Ruskin's antago- 
nism to machine-made goods, and his strong preference 
for goods made by hand; the latter are the product of 
intelligence, and work that has pleasure in its act, and the 
former are not; the one work develops men, the other 
divides and enslaves them. 

He then gives his standard of wages in three principles, 
which to all men of just and honorable minds will appear 
self-evident and imperative. First, men should be paid 
for the actual work done; secondly, "a man should in 
justice be paid for difficult or dangerous work proportion- 



The Teaching of Ruskin 235 

ately more than for easy and safe work, supposing the 
other conditions of the work similar"; thirdly, "if a man 
does a given quantity of work for me, I am bound in 
justice to do, or procure to be done, a precisely equal 
quantity of work for him; and just trade in labor is the 
exchange of equivalent quantities of labor of different 
kinds." Thus the employer of labor is himself a laborer, 
giving, in exchange for work done for him, another kind 
of work done for those who serve under him. The fac- 
tory worker is not "a hand," but a man, and it is the 
bounden duty of his employer to see that he has a fair 
share of food, and warmth and comfort, and a reasonable 
opportunity of attending to the wants of his mind and the 
culture of his soul. His claim is not, and never can be, 
settled adequately by any award of money; his employer 
is also responsible for the nature of his life. If the indi- 
vidual employer is too callous or indifferent to attend to 
these responsibilities, then it is the business of the state to 
step in, and force upon the avaricious and foolish master 
the uistant attendance to his duties. Indeed, in almost 
all that concerns trade, Ruskin advocates what we under- 
stand as State Socialism. He would have either the 
trade-guild or the state fix a standard of excellence for all 
manufactured articles. The public would soon discover 
that it was all the better off by buying a sound article, 
and the craze for mere cheapness would die with the dis- 
covery that the cheap thing is, in the long run, the dear- 
est, being worthless at any price. Moreover, such a wise 
interference by the state, if all states would unite in its 
enforcement, would, in the end, kill the demon of com- 
petition, which is the curse of commerce. "The primal 
and eternal law of vital commerce shall be of all men 



236 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

understood; namely, that every nation is fitted by its 
character, and the nature of its territories, for some par- 
ticular employments or manufactures; and that it is the 
true interest of every other nation to encourage it in such 
speciality, and by no means to interfere with, but in all 
ways forward and protect, its efforts, ceasing all rivalship 
with it, so soon as it is strong enough to occupy its proper 
place." The one necessary principle for all honorable 
and efficient trade is thus seen to be co-operation. First 
of all, between the employers and the employed, each 
honestly working to serve the public by the production of 
the best possible article; and then between nations, each 
separate people producing what it can produce best, for 
the general international good. 

It will, of course, be said, that under such a system as 
this no large fortunes could be made; but equally it is 
true that nine-tenths of our want and misery would disap- 
pear, the other tenth being that caused by vice and im- 
providence, which no state can remove so long as man 
has the right to ruin himself. The question is. How are 
large fortunes made, and by what methods, under the 
existing system.' Ruskin replies that such fortunes as are 
the prizes of commerce can only be made in one of three 
ways: I. By obtaining command over the labor of mul- 
titudes of other men, and taxing it for our own profit ; 
2. By treasure-trove, as of mines, useful vegetable 
products, and the like — in circumstances putting them 
under our own exclusive control; 3. By speculation 
(commercial gambling). Ruskin categories these three 
methods under the scathing title of "The nature of theft 
by unjust profits," and after explaining by what means 



The Teaching of Ruskin 237 

such dishonest acquisition is accomphshed, asks us to 
"consider further, how many of the carriages that ghtter 
in our streets are driven, and how many of the stately 
houses that gleam among our English fields are inhabited, 
by this kind of thief!" His remedy for the first kind of 
theft is, as we have seen, a just system of co-operation; 
and while no remedy is stated for the second, yet the plain 
suggestion is the nationalization of mines and mineral 
treasure generally, as the property of the state, to be 
administered for the good of all. Of the third form of 
theft his words are unmistakably stern and incisive; "for 
in all cases of profit derived from speculation, at best, 
what one man gains another loses; and the net result to 
the state is zero (pecuniarily), with the loss of time and 
ingenuity spent in the transaction; beside the disadvan- 
tage involved in the discouragement of the losing party, 
and the corrupted moral natures of both." 

And beyond all this, Ruskin teaches that great fortunes 
are rarely a blessing to their possessors, and the truly for- 
tunate man is he whose wealth is in the limitation of his 
lower desires, and the extension of his higher aspirations. 
The gospel of plain living and high thinking is after all a 
possible gospel, within the reach of all. The love of 
money is the root of all the evil in our modern life. It is 
right that work should be honestly remunerated ; but if we 
love the fee more than the work, then fee is our master, 
"and the lord of fee, who is the Devil." The true 
advancement of men must begin in the heart and con- 
science, and it is because England has grown in wealth, 
but not in character, that we have side by side the prodi- 
gality of the rich and the want of the poor; and having 



238 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

regard to the first alone, persuade ourselves that we live 
in an era of unexampled prosperity, and are blind to the 
realities of unexampled corruption and materialism. We 
have yet to learn the art of wise and noble living; and 
"what is chiefly needed in England at the present day is 
to show the quantity of pleasure that may be obtained by 
a consistent, well-administered competence, modest, con- 
fessed, and laborious. We need examples of people who, 
leaving heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the 
world, decide for themselves whether they will be happy 
in it, and have resolved to seek, not greater wealth, but 
simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity; 
making the first of possession self-possession; and honor- 
ing themselves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of 
peace." These are truly prophetic words, and contain 
not only the counsel of a great thinker, but of a true 
patriot, 

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What moral qualities did Ruskin associate with beauty 
and ugliness? 

2. What did he consider were the causes of bad art? 

3. How did he apply these principles to the ugliness of 
cities? 

4. What did he teach concerning the spirit in which busi- 
ness should be carried on? 

5. How does the architecture of Venice illustrate the char- 
acter of the Venetians? 

6. What similar truth is suggested by the great cathedrals? 

7. What does Ruskin teach concerning the duty and 
pleasure of work? 

8. What responsibility did he place upon tlie employer of 
labor? 

9. How did he look upon competition and commerce? 



The Teaching of Ruskin 239 

10. What remedies does he suggest for the three means 
employed by men to accumulate great wealth? 

11. What does he teach concerning man's true relation to 
wealth? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lessons from My Masters {Car/y/e, Tentiysott, and Ruskin). 
Peter Bayne. 

Three Great Teachers of Our Thne. A. H. lapp. 
fohii Rtcskin : Economist. Patrick Geddes. 
Poets a7id Problems. George Willis Cooke. 



CHAPTER XXI 

RUSKIN'S IDEAL OF WOMEN 

No summary of Raskin's teaching would be complete 
without reference to the more poetical side of his genius; 
and since it is necessary to quote some concrete example, 
we can scarcely find a better than that section of his writ- 
ings which deals specifically with the place assigned to 
woman in his new Utopia. For him, as for all really 
great writers and thinkers, woman has held a high place, 
and been a commanding influence. But one can no more 
describe in a sentence what is Ruskin's ideal woman than 
what is his ideal of art, for in all his writing he is, as we 
have seen, alternately reactionary and progressive, and at 
all times a mystic, whose perceptions are colored by a 
singularly grave and noble imagination. That he would 
not accept all the theories of female emancipation which 
are current to-day is clear from the most casual acquaint- 
ance with his drift of thought, and in this he may be 
deemed reactionary. But the reaction on its rebound 
really becomes a very large measure of progression. He 
goes back to the more ancient ideals of womanly modesty, 
humility, and service, only to link them afresh to all that 
is highest in the aims of modern life. And nowhere is his 
mysticism — the mysticism of the lover and the thinker, 
reverent and sweet and beautiful — more pronounced than 
in his treatment of woman. In Ruskin himself there is a 
certain feminine element that perhaps enables him to judge 

240 



Ruskln's Ideal of Women 241 

woman with a finer delicacy and more accurate eye than 
belong to most men; certainly with a graver sympathy 
and more chivalrous regard. 

Every one who has read the lecture on "Queen's 
Gardens" in Sesame and the Lilies will remember the 
series of fine passages in which Ruskin points out how 
reverence for womanhood has been the master note in the 
rich music of the greatest poets. We cannot do better 
than recall these passages if we would understand his own 
ideal of womanhood. Broadly speaking, he says, Shake- 
speare has no heroes — he has only heroines. The one 
entirely heroic figure in the plays — and this is after all but 
a slight sketch — is Henry V. And then he continues: 
"Coriolanus, Caesar, Anthony, stand in flawed strength, 
and fall by their vanities; Hamlet is indolent and drowsily 
speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of 
Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in 
King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and 
unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he 

sinks into the office of a servant only Whereas 

there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, 
steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; Cordelia, 
Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Cather- 
ine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, 
and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless, conceived 
in the highest heroic type of humanity." Of course the 
mind will also recall the dread figure of Lady Macbeth, 
and the revolting hard-heartedness of Regan and Goneril; 
but these, says Mr. Ruskin, were clearly meant by Shake- 
speare to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary aspects of 
life. And as it was with Shakespeare, so it was with 
Walter Scott, with Dante, with the great Greeks, and with 



2^1 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

our own Chaucer and Spenser. Wherever woman is 
pictured, it is in the bright strength of her truth and purity, 
her constancy and virtue. Chaucer writes his Legend of 
Good Women, and Spenser makes it clear to us how easily 
the best of his faery knights may be deceived and van- 
quished; " but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the 
spear of Britomart is never broken. ' ' This view of woman 
is one which Mr. Ruskin indorses and amplifies. He be- 
lieves in the old Teutonic reverence for women as the 
prophets of society, "as infallibly faithful and wise coun- 
selors, incorruptibly just and pure examples — strong 
always to sanctify even where they cannot save"; and he 
shows with completeness of illustration that the greatest 
men have believed in this ideal of womanhood, and that 
this belief has shaped and colored all that is noblest in the 
poetic literature of the world. 

Starting from this noble ideal of what woman may be, 
Ruskin works out the details of his picture with great art 
and fidelity. He will hear of no "superiority" between 
the sexes, of no obedience demanded by the one as the 
prerogative of sex, or rendered by the other as its con- 
dition. Woman was certainly not meant to be the attend- 
ant shadow of her lord, serving him with a thoughtless 
and servile obedience; for how could he be "helped 
effectually by a shadow, or worthily by slave"? And as 
for "superiority," in what does superiority lie.? For any 
true comparison there must be similarity, whereas between 
man and woman there is eternal dissimilarity. They can 
be neither equal nor unequal who have wholly different 
gifts, and are intrusted with widely various functions. 
"Each has what the other has not; each completes the 
other, and is completed by the other; they are in nothing 



Ruskin's Ideal of Women 243 

alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depend 
on each asking and receiving from the other what the 
other only can give." Yet, however radical are the differ- 
ences, simply because each is the complement of the 
other, their cause is one, and the mission and rights of 
women cannot be separated from the mission and rights 
of men. This is simply a prose statement of the phil- 
osophy which Tennyson has interpreted in memorable 
verse when he says: 

For woman is not undevelopt man, 
But diverse: could we make her as the man. 
Sweet love were slain; his bond is this, 
Not like to like, but like in difference. 

The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink 
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free. 

To the more ardent and inconsiderate spirits in the 
modern revolt of woman, all this may seem somewhat 
antiquated philosophy nowadays. Those who are loudest 
in proclaiming the advance of women sometimes talk as if 
they would be content with no advance that did not sub- 
merge man, or which at least surrendered the claim of 
absolute equality to woman. And such women will prob- 
ably resent the stress which Ruskin lays upon man's fitness 
for the world, and woman's fitness for the household. 
They will not care to admit that "man's power is active, 
progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the 
creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for 
speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for 
war, for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever con- 
quest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not 
for battle; and her intellect is not for invention or crea- 



244 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

tion, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, decision." Yet 
it may be well even for the most advanced woman to ask 
whether Tennyson and Raskin have not the truth with them, 
and whether she would not lose far more than she could 
gain by scornfully rejecting the programme each assigns 
her. For it is in the domain of the emotions that Ruskin 
makes woman supreme. The man, in his conflict with 
the world, is sure to be hardened; but it is his business to 
guard the woman against this hardening of the heart, and 
her work is to soften and purify the man by the strength 
of her emotions and the joy of her affection. The harden- 
ing of the heart is a doleful and disastrous process, which 
we see going on around us every day, and perhaps also 
perceive within us. -We accept the responsibility for 
training the mind, but we do not think it necessary to train 
and educate the emotions. More than this, we English 
people are for the most part ashamed of our emotions, and 
take a pride in repressing them, so that equally in Europe 
and America we are regarded as the coldest and most 
phlegmatic of races. It is, no doubt, not well to wear the 
heart upon the sleeve, but it is still worse to repress the 
emotions until they become sterile, and the very power of 
feeling dies in us. For the Englishman, the home is the 
one secure asylum where he permits his heart to beat 
freely, and for that reason we, more than most peoples, 
should reverence women as the queens of the heart, whose 
work it is to liberate in the home the emotions that have 
been repressed in the world. Home is the place of peace, 
the sanctuary of the heart, the realm wherein the emotions 
may find free air and unimpeded action; it is, as Ruskin 
nobly says, roof and fire, shelter and warmth, shade and 
light — "Shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as 



Ruskin's Ideal of Women 145 

of the Pharos in the stormy sea." And in such a home 
it is the part of woman to be enduringly, incorruptibly 
good; instinctively, infalhbly wise — wise, not for self- 
development, but for self-renunciation; wise, not that she 
may set herself above her husband, but that she may 
never fail from his side; wise, not with the narrowness of 
insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentle- 
ness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, 
modesty of service — the true changefulness of woman." 
"Wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunci- 
ation," this again will sound like a note of reaction, and 
will be distasteful to many noble souls who toil heroically 
for the advance of woman. Yet the whole evil is in the 
sound — there is no error in the sentiment. If morality is 
more than culture, if to be is better than to know, if char- 
acter is a more precious gain than even knowledge, then 
it is clear that self-renunciation, by which the flower of 
the soul is brought to fullness, is a nobler gain than self- 
development, by which the mind is trained to alert activity 
and the body to athletic vigor. But what Ruskin means 
by self-development is the development of selfishness, just 
as by self-renunciation he means the subdual of self, and 
its suppression. Certainly he does not mean that the 
weapons of intellectual growth or physical culture are to 
be denied to women. On the contrary, he declares that 
the first duty of society to women is "to secure for her 
such physical training and exercise as may confirm her 
health and perfect her beauty"; and again, that "all such 
knowledge should be given her as may enable her to 
understand, and even to aid, the work of man." In this 
latter respect Ruskin may be claimed as one of the pio- 
neers of the higher education of women. In 1864, when 



246 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

these words were uttered, there were not many men who 
ventured to claim a perfect equality of education for men 
and women; but this Ruskin does with passionate plead- 
ing, nor is there any passage of satire in his writings more 
telling than that in which he contrasts the education 
afforded to a boy with that thought sufficient for a girl. 
He says that at least you show some respect for the tutor 
of your son, and you teach your son to respect him. You 
do not treat the dean of Christ Church or the master of 
Trinity as your inferiors. But you intrust the entire for- 
mation of a girl's "character, moral and intellectual, to a 
person whom you let your servants treat with less respect 
than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul of your 
child were a less charge than jam and groceries), and 
whom you yourself think you confer an honor upon by 
letting her sometimes sit in the drawing-room in the even- 
ing." Mr. Ruskin 's ideal woman is clearly no creature 
of unfurnished mind, meek with the meekness of igno- 
rance, subservient with the humility of self-distrust: she 
is the highest product of both physical and mental culture, 
and is fitted to sit with man in equal comradeship — 
Full-summed in all their powers, 
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-Be. 

Ruskin 's ideal of woman includes, therefore, a very full 
trust in those moral instincts which he regards as her 
highest gift, and in the unimpeded exercise of which he 
discerns her noblest power. He claims for her the largest 
liberty, because she is far less likely than man to abuse 
her hberty. He goes so far as to declare that nature in 
her is to be trusted far more than in men to do its own 
work, and to do it beautifully and beneficently. The boy 
may be chiseled into shape, but the girl must take her 



Ruskin's Ideal of Women 247 

own way, and will grow as a flower grows. The boy 
needs discipline before he will learn what is good for him; 
but the girl, if she trust her instincts, will be infallibly 
guided to what is good around her, without any, save the 
slightest, pressure from extraneous authority. Thus Mr. 
Ruskin advocates in a well-known passage the wisdom of 
letting a girl pretty much alone in the choice of her read- 
ing, so long as the mere ephemeral "package of the circu- 
lating library, wet with the last and lightest spray of the 
fountain of folly," is kept out of her way. "Turn her 
loose into the old library," he says, "and let her alone. 

She will find what is good for her, and you cannot 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a 
field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than 
you, and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and 
prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest 
thought were good." 

This is an heroic form of education, indeed, but in 
Ruskin's view it is the best form, simply because he has 
unbounded faith in the wise intuition and invincible purity 
of true womanhood. He believes with George Meredith 
that woman lies nearer to the heart of nature than man, 
and is a creature of altogether surer and wiser instinct. 
There is a sweet, old-fashioned chivalry in this doctrine, 
of which we hear little to-day. It is characteristic of the 
man. Simple himself as a child, pure and sweet-natured 
as a child, he feels something of that reverent worship for 
woman which was the soul of ancient chivalry; and no 
woman can read his writings without a fresh and happy 
sense of her own endowments, and a new and high ideal 
of how these can be best applied for the service of the 
world. 



24H Literary Leaders of Modern England 

We are al] hot for emancipation to-day. Ruskin bids 
us inquire what such emancipation really means. He 
reminds us that womanhood may be emancipated in so 
rough and wrong a fashion that the bloom of virgin grace 
may be wasted in the process, and the true charm of 
womanhood may perish. An emancipation which corrupts 
the delicacy of the soul, or dulls the sensitiveness of the 
emotions, is a fatal error, for which no gain of worldly 
shrewdness or mental acumen can be any just or appre- 
ciable recompense. It is in her power of sympathy, of 
kindness, of all fine and tender feeling, that woman's true 
strength lies, and any diminution here is not only to her a 
fatal detriment, but it is a boundless loss inflicted on soci- 
ety. To learn to feel, or to keep in unspent freshness the 
power to feel, is for woman of far greater moment than 
to learn to know, or to learn to achieve some poor battle 
in the clamorous strifes of a callous world. There is a 
higher thing than to speak with tongues, or to know all 
mysteries, and that is to love with the love that thinketh 
no evil, that rejoiceth in the truth, that beareth all things, 
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 
This is the essence of Ruskin's ideal womanhood. Noth- 
ing that ought to be shared with man will he deny her, but 
he insists that there are many things she need not wish to 
share, because she is the mistress of a larger wealth which 
is hidden in her own soul. To know how to love truly, 
to feed the sacred flame of love which is the glory of the 
world, to soften the asperities of life with her charity, and 
to brighten its joys by her diviner force of feeling — this is 
the true programme of true womanhood, and there is no 
noble-natured woman who will not grant that it is a high 
and noble ideal. 



Ruskin's Ideal of Women 249 



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 

1. What contrast does Ruskin bring out between Shake- 
speare's heroes and his heroines? 

2. What is his view of the so-called superiority of one sex 
over the other? 

3. What general traits does he ascribe to man and what to 
woman? 

4. How does he show the importance of woman's influence 
in the home? 

5. How does he condemn the lack of consideration given 
to woman's education? 

6. What theories does he hold as to the nature of a woman's 
education? 

7. What dangers to womanhood does he fear from attempts 
to " emancipate " her? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Proeterita. Outlines of My Past Life. John Ruskin. 

Complete Works of JoJin Ruskiti. (Illustrated Cabinet Edi- 
tion.) In 26 volumes, sold separately at $1.50 each. There are 
numerous cheap editions of Sesame and Lilies, Unto This Last, 
and other of his essays. 

Temiyson, Ruskiti, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates. 
Frederic Harrison. 



SELECTIONS FROM WORDSWORTH 



I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD 

Written at Town-end, Grasmere. The daffodils grew and still grow on 
the margin of Ullsvvater, and probably may be seen to this day as beau- 
tiful in the month of March, nodding their golden heads beside the dancing 
and foaming waves. 

I wandered lonely as a cloud 
That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 

When all at once I saw a crowd, 
A host of golden daffodils; 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees. 

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

Continuous as the stars that shine 

And twinkle on the Milky Way, 
They stretched in never-ending line 

Along tlie margin of a bay ; 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 

The waves beside them danced; but ihey 
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: 

A poet could not but be gay. 
In such a jocund company: 

I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 

What wealth the show to me had brought: 

For oft, when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood. 
They flash upon that inward eye, 

Which is the bliss of solitude; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils. 

251 



252 Literary Leaders of Modern England 



THE WORLD'S RAVAGES 

The world is too much with us: late and soon. 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: 

Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 

The winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are up-gathered now like sleeping ilowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune. 
It moves us not. — Great God! 1' d rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 



ODE 

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF 
EARLY CHILDHOOD 

The Child is father of the Man: 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety. 

I 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight. 

To me did seein 

Appareled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
It is not now as it has been of yore; — 

Turn wheresoe'er I may, 

By night or day. 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 



Selections from Wordsworth 253 

V 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And Cometh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows 

He sees it in his joy; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the East 

Must travel, still is Nature's Briest; 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended; 
At length the Man perceives it die away. 
And fade into the light of common day. 

VI 

Earth tills her lap with pleasure of her own; 
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind. 
And even with something of a Mother's mind. 

And no unworthy aim, 

The homely Nurse doth all she can 
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, 

Forget the glories he hath known, 
And that imperial palace whence he came. 

VIII 
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 

Thy Soul's immensity; 
Thou best Bhilosopher, yet who dost keep 
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind. 
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
Haunted forever by the eternal mind, — 



2 54 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! 

On whom those truths do rest, 
Which we are toiHng all our lives to find, 
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; 
Thou, over whom thy Immortality 
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, 
A Presence which is not to be put by; 
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might 
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, 
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke 
The years to bring the inevitable yoke, 
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? 
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight. 
And custom lie upon thee with weight, 
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! 



IX 



O joy! that in our embers 
Is something that doth live, 

That nature yet remembers 
What was so fugitive! 
The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
Perpetual benediction: not indeed 
For that which is most worthy to be blest: 
Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, ^ 

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: 

Not for these I raise 

The song of thanks and praise; 

But for those obstinate questionings 

Of sense and outward things. 

Fallings from us, vanishings; 

Blank misgivings of a Creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized. 
High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing sur[)rised: 



Selections from Wordsworth 255 

But for those first affections, 

Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may. 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day. 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing; 
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake. 

To perish never; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor. 

Nor Man nor Boy. 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
Can utterly abolish or destroy! 

Hence in a season of calm weather 

Though inland far we be, 
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither. 

Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the Children sport upon the shore. 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 



Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! 

And let the young Lambs bound 

As to the tabor's sound! 
We in thought will join your throng, 

Ye that pipe and ye that play, 

Ye that through your hearts to day 

Feel the gladness of the May! 
What though the radiance which was once so bright 
Be now forever taken from my sight. 

Though nothing can bring back the hour 
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; 

We will grieve not, rather find 

Strength in what remains behind; 

In the primal sympathy 

Which having been must ever be; 



256 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

In the soothing thoughts that spring 
Out of human suffering; 
In the faith that looks througli death, 
In years that bring the philosophic mind. 



XI 

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, 

Forbode not any severing of our loves! 

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; 

I only have relinquished one delight 

To live beneath your more habitual sway. 

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret. 

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; 

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day 

Is lovely yet; 
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; 
Another race hath been, and other palms are won. 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 
Thanks to its tenderness, its Joys, and fears. 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 



SELECTIONS FROM TENNYSON 



CROSSING THE BAR 

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea. 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark; 
And may there be no sadness of farewell. 

When I embark. 

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar. 



PROEM FROM IN MEMORIAM 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 

Believing where we cannot prove. 

Thine are these orbs of light and shade; 

Thou madest Life in man and brute; 

Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 

257 



258 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 

Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die; 

And thou hast made him: thou art just. 

Thou seemest human and divme, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou: 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 

Our wills are ours to make them thine. 

Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee, 

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

We have but faith: we cannot know; 

For knowledge is of things we see; 

And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness: let it grow. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell: 
That mind and soul, according well. 

May make one music as before. 

But vaster. We are fools and slight; 
We mock thee when we do not fear: 
But help thy foolish ones to bear; 

Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. 

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me; 

What seem'd my worth since I began; 

For merit lives from man to man, 
And not from man, O Lord, to thee. 

Forgive my grief for one removed, 

Thy creature, whom I found so fair. 
I trust he lives in thee, and there 

I find him worthier to be loved. 



Selections from Tennyson 259 

Forgive these wild and wandering cries, 

Confusions of a wasted youth; 

Forgive them where they fail in truth, 
And in thy wisdom make me wise. 



GUINEVERE 

SELECTED PASSAGES 

But when the Queen immersed in such a trance. 
And moving thro' the past unconsciously. 
Came to that point where first she saw the King 
Ride toward her from the city, sigh'd to find 
Her journey done, glanced at him, thought him cold. 
High, self-contained, and passionless, not like him, 
"Not like my Lancelot" — while she brooded thus 
And grew half-guilty in her thoughts again. 
There rode an armed warrior to the doors. 
A murmuring whisper thro' the nunnery ran, 
Then on a sudden cry, " the King." She sat 
Stiff-stricken, listening; but when armed feet 
Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors 
Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell. 
And grovell'd with her face against the floor; 
There with her milk-white arms and shadowy hair 
She made her face a darkness from the King; 
And in the darkness heard his armed feet 
Pause by her; then came silence, then a voice, 
Monotonous and hollow like a Ghost's 
Denouncing judgment, but tho' changed, the King's 

" Liest thou here so low, the child of one 
I honor'd, happy, dead before thy shame? 
Well is it that no child is born of thee. 
The children born of thee are sword and fire. 
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. 
The craft of kindred and the Godless hosts 
Of heathen swarming o'er the Northern Sea, 



26o Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Whom I, while yet Sir Lancelot, my right arm, 

The mightiest of my knights, abode with me, 

Have everywhere about this land of Christ 

In twelve great battles ruining overthrown. 

And knowest thou now from whence I come? — from him, 

From waging bitter war with him; and he, 

That did not shun to smite me in worse way. 

Had yet that grace of courtesy in him left, 

He spared to lift his hand against the King 

Who made him knight: but many a knight was slain; 

And many more, and all his kith and kin 

Clave to him, and abode in his own land. 

And many more when Modred raised revolt. 

Forgetful of their troth and lealty, clave 

To Modred, and a remnant stays with me. 

And of this remnant will I leave a part. 

True men who love me still, for whom 1 live, 

To guard thee in the wild hour coming on. 

Lest but a hair of this low head be harm'd. 

Fear not: thou shalt be guarded till my death. 

Howbeit I know, if ancient prophecies 

Have erred not, that I march to meet my doom. 

Thou hast not made my life so sweet to me. 

That I the King should greatly care to live; 

For thou has spoilt the purpose of my life. 

Bear with me for the last time while I show, 

E'en for thy sake, the sin which thou hast sinned. 

For when the Roman left us, and their law 

Relax'd its hold upon us, and the ways 

Were fill'd with rapine, here and there a deed 

Of prowess done redress'd a random wrong. 

But I was first of all the kings who drew 

The knighthood-errant of this realm and all 

The realms together under me, their head. 

In that fair order of my Table Round, 

A glorious company, the flower of men. 

To serve as model for the mighty world, 

And be the fair beginning of a time. 



Selections from Tennyson 261 

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear 

To reverence the King, as if he were 

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, 

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs. 

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity. 

To love one maiden only, cleave to her 

And worship her by years of noble deeds. 

Until they won her; for indeed I knew 

Of no more subtle master under heaven 

Than is the maiden passion for a maid, 

Not only to keep down the base in man. 

But teach high thought and amiable words, 

And courtliness, and the desire of fame. 

And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 

And all this throve until I wedded thee, 

Believing, " lo, mine helpmate, one to feel 

My purpose and rejoicing in my joy." 

Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot; 

Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt; 

Then others, following these my mightiest knights. 

And drawing foul ensample from fair names, 

Sinn'd also, till the loathsome opposite 

Of all my heart had destined did obtain. 

And all thro' thee! so that this life of mine 

I guard as God's high gift from scathe and wrong. 

Not greatly care to lose; but rather think 

How sad it were for Arthur, should he live. 

To sit once more within his lonely hall. 

And miss the wonted number of my knights. 

And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds 

As in the golden days before thy sin. 

For which of us, who might be left, could speak 

Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee? 

And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk 

Thy shadow still would glide from room to room. 

And I should evermore be vext with thee 



262 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

In hanging robe or vacant ornament, 

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair. 

For think not, tho' thou wouldst not love thy lord, 

Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee. 

I am not made of so slight elements. 

Yet I must leave thee, woman, to thy shame." 



He paused, and in the pause she crept an inch 
Nearer, and laid her hands about his feet. 
Far off a solitary trumpet blew. 
Then waiting by the doors the war horse neigh'd 
As at a friend's voice, and he spake again. 

" Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes, 

I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, 

I, whose vast pity almost makes me die 

To see thee, laying there thy golden head. 

My pride in happier summers, at my feet. 

The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law 

The doom of treason and of flaming death, 

(When first I learnt thee hidden here) is past. 

The pang — which while I weighed thy heart with one 

Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee. 

Made my tears burn — is also past, in part, 

And all is past, the sin is sinn'd, and I, 

Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 

Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest. 

But how to take last leave of all I loved? 

golden hair with which I used to play 
Not knowing ! O imperial moulded form, 
And beauty such as never woman wore, 
Until it came a kingdom's curse with thee — 

1 cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine. 

But Lancelot's: nay, they never were the King's. 
I cannot take thy hand; that, too, is flesh. 
And in the flesh thou hast sinn'd; and mine own fleshy 
Here looking down on thee polluted, cries 



Selections from Tennyson 263 

"I loathe thee": yet not less, O Guinevere, 
For I was ever virgin save for thee. 
My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life 
So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 
Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul. 
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 
Hereafter in that world where all are pure 
We two may meet before high God, and thou 
Wilt spring to me and claim me thine, and know 
1 am thine husband — not a smaller soul, 
Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, 
I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence. 
Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow: 
They summon me their King to lead mine hosts 
Far down to that great battle in the west. 
Where I must strike against the man they call 
My sister's son — no kin of mine, who leagues 
With lords of the White Horse, heathen, and knights- 
Traitors — and strike him dead, and meet myself 
Death, or I know not what mysterious doom. 
And thou remaining here wilt learn the event; 
But hither shall I never come again, 
Never lie by thy side, see thee no more, 
Farewell!" 

And while she grovell'd at his feet. 
She felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck 
And in the darkness o'er her fallen head. 
Perceived the waving of his hands that l:)lest. 



SELECTIONS FROM BROWNING 



THE PATRIOT 

AN OLD STORY 

It was roses, roses, all the way, 
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad: 

The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, 
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had, 

A year ago on this very day. 

The air broke into a mist with bells, 

The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. 
Had I said, " Good folk, mere noise repels — 

But give me your sun from yonder skies! " 
They had answered, "And afterward, what else? ' 

Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun 
To give it my loving friends to keep! 

Naught man could do, have I left undone: 
And you see my harvest, what I reap 

This very day, now a year has run. 

There 's nobody on the housetops now — 
Just a palsied few at the window set; 

For the best of the sight is, all allow, 
At the Shambles' Gate — or, better yet, 

By the very scaffold's foot, I trow. 

I go in the rain, and, more than needs, 
A rope cuts both my wrists behind; 

And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, 
For they fling, whoever has a mind. 

Stones at me for my year's misdeeds. 
264 



Selections from Browning 265 

Thus I entered, and thus I go! 

In triumphs people have dropped down dead. 
" Paid by the world, what dost thou owe 

Me?" — God might question; now instead, 
'T is God shall repay: I am safer so. 



PROSPICE 

This poem was written in the autumn following Mrs. Browning's death. 

Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat, 

The mist in my face, 
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 

I am nearing the place. 
The power of the night, the press of the storm. 

The post of the foe; 
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form. 

Yet the strong man must go: 
For the journey is done and the summit attained. 

And the barriers fall, 
Though a battle 's to fight ere the guerdon be gained. 

The reward of it all. 
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 

The best and the last! 
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore. 

And bade me creep past. 
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers. 

The heroes of old, 
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 

Of pain, darkness and cold. 
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 

The black minute's at end. 
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again. 

And with God be the rest! 



266 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

ONE WAY OF LOVE 

All June I bound the rose in sheaves. 

Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves, 

And strew them where Pauline may pass. 

She will not turn aside? Alas! 

Let them lie. Suppose they die? 

The chance was they might take her eye. 

How many a month I strove to suit 
These stubborn fingers to the lute! 
To-day I venture all I know. 
She will not hear my music? So! 
Break the string; fold music's wing: 
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing! 

My whole life long I learned to love. 
This hour my utmost art I prove. 
And speak my passion — heaven or hell? 
She will not give me heaven? 'T is well! 
Lose who may — I still can say, 
Those who win heaven, blest are they! 



MEETING AT NIGHT 

The gray sea and the long black land; 
And the yellow half-moon large and low; 

And the startled littie waves that leap 

In fiery ringlets from their sleep, 
As I gain the cove with pushing prow, 
And quench its speed in the slushy sand. 

Then mile of warm sea-scented beach; 

Three fields to cross till a farm appears; 
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch 
And the blue spurt of a lighted match, 

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,- 

Than the two hearts beating each to each! 



Selections from Browning 267 



PARTING AT MORNING 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 



CHRISTMAS-EVE 

SELECTED PASSAGES 

For lo, what think you? Suddenly 

The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky 

Received at once the full fruition 

Of the moon's consummate apparition. 

The black cloud-barricade was riven, 

Ruined beneath her feet, and driven 

Deep in the West; while bare and breathless, 

North and South and East lay ready 

For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, 

Sprang across them and stood steady. 

'T was a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect. 

From heaven to heaven extending, perfect 

As the mother-moon's self, full in face. 

It rose, distinctly at the base 

With its seven proper colors chorded, 

Which still, in the rising, were compressed. 

Until at last they coalesced. 

And supreme the spectral creature lorded 

In a triumph of whitest white, — 

Above which intervened the night. 

But above night, too, like only the next, 

The second of a wondrous sequence, 

Reaching in rare and rarer frequence. 

Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed. 

Another rainbow rose, a mightier, 

Fainter, flushier, and flightier, — 

Rapture dying along its verge. 



268 Literary Leaders of Modern England 

Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge, 
Whose, from the straining topmost dark, 
On to the keystone of that arc? 



All at once I looked up with terror. 

He was there. 

He himself with his human air, 

On the narrow pathway, just before. 

1 saw the back of him, no more — 

He had left the chapel, then, as I. 

I forgot all about the sky. 

No face: only the sight 

Of a sweepy garment, vast and white, 

With a hem that I could recognize. 

I felt terror, no surprise; 

My mind filled with the cataract 

At one bound of the mighty fact. 

" I remember, he did say 

Doubtless that, to this world's end. 

Where two or three should meet and pray. 

He would be in the midst, their friend; 

Certainly he was there with them!" 

And my pulses leaped for joy 

Of the golden thought without alloy, 

That I saw his very vesture's hem. 

Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear. 

With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear; 

And I hastened, cried out while I pressed 

To the salvation of the vest; 

"But not so, Lord! It cannot be 

That thou, indeed, art leaving me — 

Me, that have despised thy friends! 

Did my heart make no amends? 

Thou art the love of God — above 

His power, didst hear me place his love. 

And that was leaving the world for thee. 

Therefore thou must not turn from me 

As I had chosen the other part! 



Selections from Browning 269 

Folly and pride o'ercame my heart. 
Our best is bad, nor bears thy test; 
Still, it should be our very best. 
I thought it best that thou, the spirit, 
Be worshiped in spirit and in truth. 
And in beauty, as even we require it — 
Not in the forms burlesque, uncouth, 
I left but now, as scarcely fitted 
For thee: I knew not what 1 pitied. 
But all I felt there, right or wrong. 
What is it to thee, who curest sinning? 
Am I not weak as thou art strong? 
I have looked to thee from the beginning. 
Straight up to thee through all the world 
Which, like an idle scroll, lay furled 
To nothingness on either side: 
And since the time thou wast descried, 
Spite of the weak heart, so have I 
Lived ever, and so fain would die, 
Living and dying, thee before! 
But if thou leavest me" — 

Less or more, 
I suppose that I spoke thus. 
When, — have mercy, Lord, on us! 
The whole face turned upon me full. 
And I spread myself beneath it, 
As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it 
In the cleansing sun, his wool, — 
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness 
Some defiled, discolored web — 
So lav I, saturate with brightness. 



SELECTIONS FROM RUSKIN 



FROM "THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE" 

There is a noble way of carving a man, and a mean one; 
and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a mean one; 
and a great sculptor carves his scarabaeus grandly, as he carves 
his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it 
is a sorrowful truth, yet a sublime one, that this greatness of 
treatment cannot be taught by talking about it. No, nor even 
by enforced imitative practise of it. Men treat their subjects 
nobly only when they themselves become noble; not till then. 
And that elevation of their own nature is assuredly not to be 
effected by a course of drawing from models, however well 
chosen, or of listening to lectures, however well intended. 

All lovely architecture was designed for 

cities in cloudless air; for cities in which piazzas and gar- 
dens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that 
men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each 
other's presence and powers. Ikit our cities, built in black air, 
which, by its accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament 
invisible in distance, and then chokes its interstices with soot; 
cities which are mere crowded masses of store and warehouse, 
and counter, and are therefore to the rest of the world what 
the larder and cellar are to a private house; cities in which the 
object of men is not life, but labor; and in which all chief mag- 
nitude of edifice is to enclose machinery; cities in which the 
streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a 
happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented 
mob, in which the only object in reaching any spot is to be 
transferred to another; in which existence becomes mere 
transition, and every creature is only one atom in a drift of 
human dust, and current of interchanging particles, circulating 

270 



Selections from Ruskin 271 

here by tunnels underground, and there by tubes in the air; for 
a city, or cities, such as this, no architecture is possible — nay, 
no desire of it is possible to their inhabitants. 

One of the most singular proofs of the vanity of all hope 
that conditions of art may be combined with the occupations 
of such a city, has been given lately in the design of the new 
iron bridge over the Thames at Blackfriars. Distinct attempt 
has been there made to obtain architectural effect on a grand 
scale. Nor was there anything in the nature of the work to 
prevent such an effort being successful. It is not an edifice's 
being of iron, or of glass, or thrown into new forms, demanded 
by new purposes, which need hinder its being beautiful. But 
it is the absence of all desire of beauty, of all joy in fancv, and 
of all freedom in thought. If a Greek, or Egyptian, or Gothic 
architect had been required to design such a bridge, he would 
have looked instantly at the main conditions of its structure, 
and dwelt on them with the delight of imagination. He would 
have seen that the main thing to be done was to hold a hori- 
zontal group of iron rods steadily and straight over stone piers. 
Then he would have said to himself (or felt without saying), 
"It is this holding — this grasp — this securing tenor of a thing 
which might be shaken, on which I have to insist." And he 
would have put some life into those iron tenons. As a Greek 
put human life into his pillars and produced the caryatid, and 
an Egyptian lotus-life into his pillars and produced the lily 
capital, so here, either of them would have put some gigantic 
or angelic life into those colossal sockets. He would perhaps 
have put vast winged statues of bronze, folding their wings, and 
grasping the iron rails with their hands; or monstrous eagles, 
or serpents holding with claw or coil, or strong, four-footed ani- 
mals couchant, holding with the paw, or in fierce action, 
holding with teeth. Thousands of grotesque or of lovely 
thoughts would have risen before him, and the bronze forms, 
animal or human, would have signified, either in symbol or in 
legend, whatever might be gracefully told respecting the pur- 
poses of the work and the districts to which it conducted. 
Whereas, now, the entire invention of the designer seems to 
have exhausted itself in exaggerating to an enormous size a 



1'ji Literary Leaders of Modern England 

weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the information upon 
it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London, Chatham, and 
Dover Railway Company. 



FROM "UNTO THIS LAST " 
"the veins of wealth" 

It has been shown that the chief value and virtue of money 
consists in its having power over human beings; that without 
this power, large material possessions are useless, and to any 
person possessing such power, comparatively unnecessary. But 
power over human beings is attainable by other means than 
by money. As I said a few pages back, the money power is 
always imperfect and doubtful; there are many things that 
cannot be retained by it. Many joys may be given to men 
which cannot be bought for gold, and many fidelities found in 
them which cannot be rewarded by it. 

Trite enough — the reader thinks. Yes: but it is not so 
trite — I wish it were — that in this moral power, quite inscrut- 
able and immeasurable though it be, there is a monetary value 
just as real as that represented by more ponderous currencies. 
A man's hand may be full of invisible gold, and the wave of it, 
or the grasp of it shall do more than another's with a shower 
of bullion. This invisible gold, also, does not necessarily di- 
minish in spending. Political economists will do well some day 

to take heed of it, though they cannot take measure 

Finally. Since the essence of wealth consists in power over 
men, will it not follow that the nobler and the more in num- 
ber the persons are over whom it has power, the greater the 
wealth? Perhaps it may even appear after some consideration, 
that the persons themselves are the wealth — that these pieces 
of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in 
fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trap- 
pings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith 
we bridle the creatures; but that if these same living creatures 
could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the Byzants 
in their mouths and ears, they might themselves be more valu- 
able than their bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the 



Selections from Ruskin 273 

true veins of wealth are purple — and not in Rock, but in 
Flesh — perhaps even that the final outcome and consummation 
of all wealth is in the producing as many as possible full- 
breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures. 
Nay, in some far-away and undreamt-of hour, 
I can even imagine that England may cast all thoughts 
of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom 
they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and 
adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the 
charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a Chris- 
tian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures 
of a heathen one, and be able to lead forth her sons, saying — 
" These are my Jewels." 



SELECTION FROM CARLYLE 



FROM "PAST AND PRESENT" 

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in 
Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high 
calling, there is alvv^ays hope in a man that actually and ear- 
nestly works; in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. 
Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with 
Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one 
more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regula- 
tions, which are truth. The latest Gospel in this world is. 
Know thy work and do it. " Know thyself": long enough has 
that poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get 
to "know "it I believe! Think it not thy business, this of 
knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: Know 
what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules ! That 
will be thy better plan. 

It has been written, "An endless significance lies in work"; 
a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared 
away, fair seed fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal, 
the man himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwhole- 
some desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts 
of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of 
real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work ! Doubt, De- 
sire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these 
like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, 
as of every man; but he bends himself with free valor against 
his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring 
far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed 
glow of Labor in him, is it not as a purifying fire, wherein all 
poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made 
bright blessed flame ? . . . . Labor is life: from the 

274 



Selection from Carlyle 275 

inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given Force, the sa- 
cred, celestial Life — essence breathed into him by Almighty 
God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness — to 
all knowledge, " self-knowledge," and much else, so soon as 
work fitly begins. Knowledge ? The knowledge that will hold 
good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself ac- 
credits that, says yea to that. Properly thou hast no other 
knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet 
all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in 
schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, 
till we try it and fix it. "Uoubt, of whatever kind, can be end- 
ed by Action alone." , 



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